Imagine for a moment that we live in a Nozickian society – by which I mean a society in which there is substantial but just material inequality.Our own highly unequal Society may be perfectly just according to some particular criteria of Justice known to an Archangel. I may say- hang on, so and so stole my watch. It is unjust that he has it and I don't. The Archangel may reply- that theft was ordained by God for a purpose beyond mortal ken.
Nozick guarded against this type of thinking by making justice procedural as Amia acknowledges in her next line-
A minority of people have the majority of the resources, but these resources are distributed through a series of just transfers; no one has anything they are not entitled to, and everyone has everything to which they are entitled.If this is 'common knowledge' then it follows that it is also 'common knowledge' that no theft, embezzlement or unjust enrichment can escape detection and redressal almost instantaneously. We can imagine living in such a world, but it would be one where we need take no precaution and exercise no prudence with respect to the possibility of theft, fraud, malfeasance, unconscionable contracts, negligence etc. A Nozickian society is so informationally rich that it would operate with very few Judges and policemen and auditors and lawyers.
Is such a society mathematically feasible? Not unless the future is known in advance and thus no 'incomplete contracts' exist. Otherwise, it must always be the case that procedural Justice has no way of confirming 'just transfer' at time t, without a considerable lag. In other words, no one can know they live in a Nozickian Society until every last incomplete contract expires.
Of course if you think that Nozick is simply wrong about the demands of justice, then you will deny that such a Nozickian world is possible – for if Nozick is wrong, he is (presumably) necessarily wrong.It may be, that if we live in a Nozickian society, we become incapable of believing Nozick to be wrong about the demands of justice. This would be the case if the economic substructure of a society shaped our consciousness or 'ideology'. However, we still would not know we live in a Nozickian world. How then are we to imagine 'for a moment' that we live in one, if we can't know we live in one? I can imagine living as a cat, if only for one moment. Indeed, I am doing it now- saying 'miaow' and waving a paw in the air. But, I can't imagine living as some animal I can't know I am. Is Amia talking nonsense?
Not necessarily. If justice is 'scarce' (i.e. involves an opportunity cost- e.g. giving up privacy) and markets for epistemic goods exist, then it must be the case that a Nozickian society which knows itself to be so- i.e. a Society which has justified true belief that all transfers have been and are just (this notion can be formalised in terms of blockchains)- has ubiquitous 'zero knowledge proofs' that this is the case (otherwise the market for epistemic goods would collapse- since there would be an obligation to supply the whole thing for free for verification purposes). Suppose there is no such proof. In that case, even if people had a true belief that their world was Nozickian, it would not be justified and thus it wouldn't be true.
Alternatively, we could say a Nozickian Society is a model of a first order doxastic logic. For its citizens to know it is Nozickian, it must be a model for a second order existential logic and thus, by a theorem of Ron Fagin's, in NP. In other words, one way or another, descriptive complexity is of the essence.
So what? Surely, nothing would change? Unfortunately, economic theory tells us that something would indeed change. You see, 'zero knowledge proofs' are theoretically possible. Successive approximations to such proofs solve particular types of Moral Hazard, Concurrency & Agenda Control problems. Thus, they have real economic and legal (for torts & incomplete contracts) effects. Mathematical breakthroughs- e.g. those made by the recent Fields & Nevanlinna Prize winners- change both Economics (i.e. what is 'Muth Rational') as well as Physics and Technology. In other words, a Nozickian Society would be a Palestine which a Mathematical Moses would be allowed only a Pisgah glimpse of.
Philosophy, if informed by such Mathematical Economics, can spy out that land of milk and honey using its 'distinctions without differences' (because some problems in Math are open). But lacking such aid, it can no more imagine a Nozickian Society (where Law & Economics must be univocal) than I can by making cat like noises.
Amia, it appears, is innocent of even such Mathematical notions as I retain at my advanced age.
Thus, she takes a different tack-
But such a world, even if metaphysically impossible, is presumably conceivable – certainly many Americans think it is not only possible but actual. So let us imagine we live in such a society. My question is this: would elites in a Nozickian world develop bad ideology?By 'bad ideology', Amia means anti-democratic beliefs 'resistant to rational revision”. I have just shown that it is irrational to believe one lives in a Nozickian society because one can't know that no undetected theft or malfeasance has occurred. Thus Amia is asking us to imagine we live in a Society where we have a belief which is 'resistant to rational revision'. But beliefs of this type have no defense against parasitic memes. Thus, while imagining myself living in a Nozickian world I have no way to subject my belief that this is the case to rational revision. Suppose an internet meme involving a cat saying 'O Long Johnson' catches my attention. I return to my belief that I live in a Nozickian world but find I do so as a cat saying 'O Long Johnson'. However, I can no more rationally revise this parasitic meme- for example by checking that I have hands, not paws- than I can revise the belief that I'm imaging myself in a Nozickian world.
What if we dispense with Amia's requirement that we imagine ourselves to be living in a Nozickian world. Let us look only at the elite in that world. What sort of ideology would they have?
To answer this question, we need to ask why people might subscribe to an ideology in the first place. One reason to do so is so as to change jurisprudence such that unjust transfers become just in a manner advantageous to oneself or which appears meritorious for some other reason.
However, a Nozickian world does not permit such changes because its claim is to be already as just as possible. Thus ideology would be useless to everybody in such a world- unless they didn't believe it was Nozickian at all.
Amia does not take this tack in evaluating the claim made by Jason Stanley that material inequality will lead to elites using propaganda to spread mischievous beliefs that are somehow undemocratic.
Amia summarises Stanley's argument thus-
Jason’s overall project is to think of it as an argument for the incompatibility of substantial material inequality and democracy that does not rest on any assumptions about the moral badness or injustice of inequality. The argument, in brief, goes like this: (1) substantial material inequality, whether unjust or just, predictably leads to the emergence of flawed ideology, (2) the existence of flawed ideology makes us susceptible to demagoguery, a pernicious form of propaganda, (3) demagoguery undermines democracy by creating epistemological inequalities. Thus substantial material inequality, whether just or unjust, undermines democracy. If successful, Jason’s argument gives us a non-moral reason to dislike substantial material inequality, at least insofar as we are independently committed to a democratic society.The problem with this view is that, if 'flawed ideology' arises out of both just and unjust inequality, then it must also arise out of equality, however just or unjust provided Knightian uncertainty prevails- i.e. Darwin not Deuteronomy got hold of the right end of the stick. This is because equality may be perceived by some as inequality simply because of phenotypal diversity. Stochastically, for large enough populations, there must be at least some 'flawed ideology' no matter what the is happening in Society.
Furthermore ex post equality can't be guaranteed for any ex ante configuration of the Contract Space. Thus at ever moment of perfect equality, a perturbation may occur which, regardless of whether it is protocol bound and just, or transgressive and unjust, will cause a flawed ideology to arise which, in turn, may cause a runaway process. The only way to tame this is to either assume 'Muth Rationality'- i.e. assume epistemological equality- or impose a restriction on the dynamics of the system- which cashes out as assuming 'flawed ideologies' degrade quickly or have a predator. Alternatively, one could just stipulate that flawed ideologies are just 'noise'- they represent a waste of resources which cancels itself out in aggregate.
If ideology- as opposed to an alethic account- actually matters, justice would not. Nor would any democratic process. Why? Ideologues would allocate resources. They may be termed Pontiffs or Priest-Kings or God's shadow on Earth. But, in essence, they would be deciding things on the basis of their picture of how the world ought to be.
No doubt, political philosophers pretend that there were certain Ideologies which were successful because most people were fools at that time and in that place. However, this is not the case. Looked at a little more closely, we see that it was not ideology, but beating and killing people which was successful. But that has always been true. Even now, even here, what restrains the sociopaths we shall always have with us (because it is part of our own Evolutionarily Stable Strategy) is fear of being beaten or killed or locked up somewhere where being beaten or killed is more likely.
In a Nozickian Society, because of its richer 'common knowledge' information set, a lively fear of being killed or incarcerated would force sociopaths to wear a mask of civility. But, in that case, only the preferences of the legal owners of resources would matter. Demagoguery would earn no higher return than making cat like noises or committing any other sort of auditory nuisance. Why would anyone want to be 'independently committed to a democratic society'? Elections for public offices would matter even less than those Televised contests, I recall from the late Eighties, where the audience voted to decide who was the best Elvis impersonator by ringing premium rate telephone lines.
Amia, typically, takes a different view. She thinks 'ideology' is something people will devote costly cognitive resources to even if the thing doesn't make a blind bit of difference. She says-
It’s hard for me to see why we should think (elites in a Nozickian society) would (have a 'bad ideology'. They would correctly believe, after all, that they were entitled to a disproportionate share of society’s resources.There is no reason they should believe they are entitled to anything. They are perfectly at liberty to give away all their wealth. They can't coerce anyone else to do so. Equally, they can't grab anything that isn't legally theirs. Thus their beliefs regarding their entitlements are irrelevant. All that matters is what the law says they can do, using what the law says is theirs.
Amia takes a different view-
Jason might be right that the elites in such a society would be strongly attached to this true story, that it would be part of what made them feel ok with the status quo, but that’s not the same as saying that such elites would be attached to a legitimation myth about themselves.A true story is still a story. One may refer to it as a legitimation myth with perfect propriety.
Now, on Jason’s notion of ideological belief, any belief that is resistant to counter-evidence – near the centre of the Quinean doxastic web – counts as ideology. But that rules in many items of knowledge as ideology: my belief that I have hands, that 2+2=4, that my mother loves me, and so on all count as ideology on Jason’s schema.Amia would scarcely believe she has hands if she saw someone chop them off and spent the rest of her days gravely incommoded as a result. She would also understand that 2+2=11 in base 3- once the Trinitarian Jihad succeeds. If her mother took to beating her regularly while cursing the day she was born, she would slowly cease to believe the woman loves her. It seems, such beliefs as she quotes are not at all resistant to counter-evidence.
Thus Jason thinks that it is only flawed ideology that makes us susceptible to propaganda and undermines democracy.If 'flawed ideology' is defined in that way- Jason's reasoning is perfectly circular.
Otherwise our beliefs in self-evident truths would be inconsistent with democracy, surely a counterintuitive result.Amia hasn't actually quoted any 'self-evident' truths. She may live in a world where all mums love their daughters and everybody has two hands and the Trinitarian Jihad, with its insistence on the use of base 3 Arithmetic, is just a figment of my imagination. However, being a devout Hindutva bakth, I firmly believe that Mums love Sons only and babies have ten hands due to they are Hindu deities and the evil Trinitarian Jihad is plotting to restore Sonia Ji to Power and then she will force us all to learn base 3 Arithmetic even though I've got a note from Mum saying I'm excused Games and Modern Math coz of my asthma, not to mention my chronic bed-wetting- OMG Mom! I told you not to mention the bed-wetting! Why do you hate me so much? Is it because I'm not pretty like Amia? I will immediately bite off eight of my arms to convey my displeasure.
So the question is: is the true belief of the Nozickian elites that they are entitled to their resources an item of flawed ideology? What could make it flawed? Perhaps we might say: if an unjust inequality arises in our Nozickian society, our elites will likely not realise it, since they are attached to the view that the current distribution of resources is just. But then we are back where we started: elites are bad at recognising unjust inequalities, and this undermines democracy. But what we were after is an argument that shows us that even just inequalities undermine democracy.How could an 'unjust inequality'- i.e. a violation of the law resulting in a rich guy getting richer and a poor guy getting poorer- arise in a Nozickian world? By definition, the thing is impossible. One possible 'mechanism' within the Law, guarding against unjust enrichment, may have a 'democratic' character. It may be that people are selected by lot, or by election, to act as ombudsmen or investigative magistrates or Grand Juries. In this case, the Law itself would provide penalties for 'demagogues' or sophists who seek to pervert the course of Justice. In other words, a Nozickian world may be a Democracy under the Rule of Law with strong safeguards against subversive propaganda.
Amia, however is looking for an argument which shows that Just inequality- e.g. that of a honest guy who works hard and thus earns more than an idle scumbag like myself- undermines democracy. Why? What great benefit would she derive by finding such an argument? Is undermining democracy something good in itself?
Amia explains that this is not her aim.
It seems to me that Jason’s motivation for offering such an argument is that he wants to be able to offer an internal critique of American society – that is, he wants to show those who are putatively committed to democracy, but sanguine about massive inequality, that they are on uneven ground. Jason wants to expose the internal contradictions within putatively democractic but highly unequal societies. It is for this reason, I suspect, that Jason wants to articulate an argument against inequality that doesn’t rest on any substantive moral premise
This is perfectly reasonable. If we want to live in a Nozickian world- i.e. one where no unjust enrichment occurs- we may recognize that a Democratic component to the Rule of Law is 'regret minimizing'- i.e. provides an additional safeguard. It is plausible that increasing inequality of income and wealth will undermine this safeguard. Currently we see that badly designed Fiscal measures increase inequality by creating perverse incentives and penalties. Improved 'mechanism design' would not just increase allocative and dynamic efficiency, it would also improve the administration of Justice and thus move us closer to a Nozickian world.
But I wonder, and this is a genuine question about politics – what it is and how to do it well – whether what we really need is such an internal critique.It seems obvious that we already have such an 'internal critique', because that is what permits the tabling of worthwhile policy suggestions. No doubt, there are 'external critiques' as well- e.g. my proposal that we should all make cat like noises so as to establish a truly equal soc..miaow miaow miaow miaow!
I wonder, in other words, whether Jason’s project isn’t constrained by its implicit desire to appeal to elites.How is this poor sap's 'project' supposed to 'appeal to elites'? If the man really has an 'implicit desire' of that sort, he's in the wrong line of work. He should become an expert on Old Masters or fine wines or Super Yachts or something of that sort which only elites can afford to buy.
If Jason’s argument against inequality does turn out to assume that substantive inequality is unjust, is that such a bad thing?Yes. Because then Amia will have to hand over half her salary to some worthless idiot who claims to be just as good a philosophy lecturer as her though the nutjob in question does nothing but stand outside her college making miaow miaow noises. I am not denying that Iyengars, like Amia, are unjustly favoured over Iyers, like myself, and that this has led to 'substantive inequality'. However, the correct way to tackle the problem is by making cat like noises.
The argument won’t get a grip on many elites, for sure, but is that the litmus test of our political theorising?The litmus test for political theorizing is whether it is 'action guiding' in terms of the choice of better policy instruments except, of course, if it consists of nothing but saying miaow, miaow, miaow.
I will return to this general question at the end: that is, the question of whether Jason’s project is too closely focussed on the possibilities of the elite position, and too little focussed on the political possibility to be found in the position of the oppressed.In other words, convincing people who have some power to change the system, that it is in their own interest to reduce avoidable inequality, is an inferior outcome to addressing people who have no power and who can't understand what you are saying- unless it is miaow, miaow.
The answer is that members of the elite should be made aware that if there is widespread unjust enrichment then there will be a search for scapegoats. They themselves, though relatively innocent, may be sacrificed to the Public's ire. Tom Wolfe's 'Bonfire of the Vanities' describes this sort of situation. It is in the interest of 'Masters of the Universe' to ensure that properly Democratic checks and balances operate within the Judicial system otherwise they might themselves become 'the Great White Defendant' who is made the scapegoat for the sins of his entire class.
To explain why the elite develop and sustain bad ideology, Jason draws on the resources of social psychology – the elite, he says, exhibit the kind of motivated reasoning known as ‘identity protective legitimation’. Again I’m curious about Jason’s motivation. Why do we need such a psychological account, that is the sort of account that is useful for explaining the maintenance of belief in the face of overwhelming counterevidence?
'Identity protective legitimation' tries to sucker you into thinking you will be protected by your affiliation. The kid who joins a gang may believe in 'omerta'. But his boss is actually a 'snitch'. He will sacrifice small-fry from time to time to keep his 'C.I' status and continue to run his racket. What is true of the gangbanger is true of the Wall Street broker. So long as there is manifest injustice, Society will seek for a 'korban', a 'pharmakos'- a scapegoat. This notion is common to both Jerusalem and Athens. Democracy under the Rule of Law, and Soteriology based on Redemptive Grace- both of which are Amia's elite Iyengar intellectual heritage- come to the same conclusion. There must be a periodic 'Jubilee' to prevent the accumulation and compounding of historic injustices. That is why India has superior affirmative action to America. Our inequities were entrenched over millennia. America's are more recent- though, it must be said, more brutal.
Amia takes a different tack-
(Jason's) presupposition seems to be that the elite are constantly having to do battle with counter-evidence to their bad ideology; that the world as it presents itself to the elite constantly threatens their self-conception; that there is something not only deeply but superficially precarious about the elite worldview.Again this seems a reasonable enough view. Elites compete within their class and are aware of a process of circulation whereby some of their number exit while others rise up from below. If the anxieties of the Poor are economic and biological, those of the Elite are chrematistic and social. It is to the latter that Moral Philosophy must address itself- at least, if it wishes to be paid.
I make the distinction between superficial and deep precarity of the elite worldview because I share with Jason (and Marx and Beauvoir) the view that most oppressive ideology, whether anti-democratic or capitalist or patriarchal, masks deep contradictions, not least because capitalism itself, as Nancy Fraser reminds us, requires the anti-capitalist space of the patriarchal home to function.Consider Osama Bin Laden's childhood home. His father was a very successful Capitalist. He paid a bride price for Osama's mother and, no doubt, paid her what was stipulated in Islamic law for nursing the baby. Then he divorced her and paid her the sum stipulated in the marriage contract. The son was the property of the father. She departed and, I believe, remarried and had other children.
In what way was this home- not untypical of many of the most successful Capitalists of the last fifty years- 'anti Capitalist'? Here, Marriage was a contract like any other. It was not a sacrament. Osama used his patrimony to achieve great fame- though, this turned to notoriety when he overplayed his hand. He fathered many children. So did his more self-effacing siblings- some of whom have endowed Western Universities in a munificent manner because of their great ability as Capitalists.
Amia may believe 'oppressive ideologies' 'mask deep contradictions'. So does spouting any type of nonsense whatsoever. Even I, when making cat like noises, am masking a deep contradiction because though I pretend to clean myself like a cat, I don't actually lick my own arsehole. What can I say? I am large. I contradict myself.
But for thinkers like Marx and Beauvoir, these contradictions do not make capitalist or patriarchal ideology superficially vulnerable. Capitalist ideology – the view that everything, labour included, is to be understood in terms of exchange value rather than use value – is not subject to an onslaught of counter-evidence.Really? Suppose I appear before a Judge whose labor involves deciding what quantum of punishment I should suffer for my transgression. I pull out a wad of notes and toss it to him in exchange for a judgment of acquittal. Guess what happens next? If Amia is right, then I will not be subject 'to an onslaught of counter-evidence', like being charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice and getting my head kicked in by the police officers whom I offer money to perform fellatio upon me in the prison van.
Capitalism only deals with legal exchange. It does not deny that there are all sorts of 'use-values' for which no markets exist because the thing would be repugnant or unconscionable or malum prohibitum purely as a shibboleth.
For this ideology is shaped by and shapes the material world, such that, from the perspective of the bourgeoisie at least – (I’ll say something about the proletariat perspective in a moment) – everything just is exchange value.No such bourgeois has ever existed. Otherwise, some slightly richer guy would just pay for him to be bumped off and then would grab his property.
Similarly, while Beauvoir thinks there is a deep contradiction at the heart of patriarchy – namely, that men posit themselves as radically free Subjects but are dependent on women-as-Objects to achieve that subject-position – she does not think that men are constantly confronted by this contradiction.Right! Coz whenever some guy said to her, 'Bend down. I want to sit on your back. You are a chair.' she would immediately comply.
The truth is men very quickly discover that women are not objects. Chairs are. That is why we spend good money on a La-Z-boy but skimp on Anniversary presents.
From the male position, women are objects, and not only because they see them as objects, but because women have been made into objects. In other words: once we confront the full force and power of oppressive ideology – its embeddenness in material and practical reality – do we really need to explain its sustenance in terms of individualistic psychology?No. We could simply make cat like noises instead. Women have not just been turned into objects, they are in constant danger of degenerating into hideously misshapen objects unless they hear cat-like noises.
No doubt psychological phenomena like confirmation bias, wishful thinking and motivated reasoning have their explanatory role to play. But isn’t the simpler, more structural explanation of why elites hold onto their elite ideology that their experience of the world, rather than resist their cherished self-conception, everywhere confirms it?
Yes, Amia, you are right. Look what happened to Martha Nussbaum. Some elite guy said 'you are a chair'- and she turned into a chair. What's that? She is not a chair? She occupies the 'Ernst Freund' Professorial chair, but nobody actually sits on her? Oh. In that case Amia is talking nonsense.
If, for Marx and his followers like Lukacs, Althusser and Hartsock, the ideological position of the oppressors is not merely a matter of bad ideology – that is, bad ideas – but also a matter of matter, of material, then how is emancipation from bad ideology even possible? Marx’s answer, famously, was that we shouldn’t look to the capitalist oppressors for emancipation. Rather, it is the proletariat who are uniquely positioned, epistemically speaking, to recognise the contradictions in capitalism. And for Hartsock, it is women who are uniquely positioned, epistemically speaking, to recognise the deep contradictions of patriarchy.Did the proletariat achieve anything? Not as such, no. The word proletariat means 'child-bearing'. No class which merely reproduced itself achieved anything at all. On the contrary, once Labor limited entry into the market for its services it began to prosper. But this meant fewer babies and discriminating against migrants or would be migrants. Similarly, women did well for themselves when they stopped making babies and started building careers and accumulating credentials or capital. Nancy Hartsock had no children. Instead she 'lavished loving attention on many fortunate cats, including Stokely, Annie, Chan, and Emma'. Thus it is only by making cat like noises that we can begin to commemorate the extraordinary liberation from Capitalist Patriarchy which her life entire was a sacrifice to.
Amia thinks differently-
Jason reserves the last two chapters of his book to explore the ideology of the oppressed as opposed to the oppressors, with particular attention to the question of false consciousness. He wants to address Michael Rosen’s challenge to offer a mechanism whereby the oppressed continue to believe a false ideology that goes against their interests.Okay. It's a Newcombe Problem- right? There's a pay-off for believing what the rich guy tells you.
But Jason tells us far less about what he thinks about the Marxian view that the oppressed, while no doubt suffering from false consciousness, are also uniquely positioned to see, precisely because of their direct connection to the reality of material production (and, in the case of women, reproduction), the contradictions within the status quo.Quite true! An eighteen year old girl working in a sweatshop in Bangladesh can explain the contradictions within the Forex market which is causing the dollar to rise and Gold to fall because...urm...Amia says so.
The oppressed, in other words, see doubly: first, the world as given within oppressive ideology, and second, the world as it really is.
Cool. So we should fire all the Professors wot know how to reed and rite gud & hire illiterate factory workers from the Third World...OMG! Is that how Gayatri got her start?
This classic Marxian view stands in tension with Jason’s claim that those who command fewest resources are most epistemically oppressed, that is, least in a position to know things that are vital for political emancipation.So the classic Marxian view, or rather Amia's version of it, is silly. Jason's is reasonable. Very poor people are epistemically very badly off. Indeed, they may be oppressed in this respect. For example they may not know that the deductions made from their wages are illegal.
Elsewhere Jason has famously argued for an interest-relative view of knowledge, according to which whether one knows some proposition turns on what’s at stake, practically speaking, in the context at hand. In short, the more it matters to you whether you’re getting onto the truth, the harder it is to know the truth. If there’s relatively little downside to your getting the answer wrong, then it’s relatively easy to know the answer.Sounds reasonable. Cognitive bias does work like that. That's why even the best Physician will get someone else to diagnose her illness and even the smartest Accountant will hire some one else to do his Tax Planning and so on.
In this book Jason doesn’t argue for interest-relativity, for he thinks it’s enough to assume (as most epistemologists do) that something bad typically happens, epistemically speaking, when one is in a high stakes situation.But, the cure is simple. Get a second opinion. If one isn't available, follow a Hannan consistent strategy- i.e. put out feelers and hedge your bets.
Perhaps, he says, one doesn’t lose justification when the stakes raise, but even so one might – as a purely psychological matter – lose confidence, thereby killing off one’s knowledge. Or you might retain your knowledge, but still be thought not to know by others, precisely because it’s so important to you that you’re right. But I want to suggest that Jason is wrong: it really does matter whether knowledge is sensitive to stakes or not in the kind of cases we’re discussing. We might all admit that as a psychological matter people are wont to lose confidence (and thus knowledge) in high-stakes situations, or that people are wont to be treated as not knowing in high-stakes situation. But still, it matters crucially, I want to suggest, whether the oppressed can retain their knowledge even when the stakes go up.What matters is that people can retain delusions even when stakes go up. That is why juristic protocols become important in such cases.
Suppose a woman knows she has been sexually harassed by her boss. She is encouraged by a lawyer friend to take legal action. Suddenly the stakes are up. It really matters to this woman that she’s right: not just for the legal outcome, but for her sense of self, the righteousness of her protest. According to the interest-relative account that Jason supports, this woman no longer knows that she has been sexually harassed once the stakes are sufficiently high.Nonsense! The interest-relative account, to be consistent, must take her knowledge of a trauma of a certain sort as a datum. Otherwise it is empty. It is a different matter that juristic protocols become important when 'the stakes are high'. It is not the case that knowledge disappears, rather it must be processed in accordance with those protocols to preserve its probative value.
By contrast, according to the sort of hard-nosed externalism I favour, so long as the woman is reliably tracking the situation – so long as she really is sensitive to the sexual harassment that she experienced – then, assuming she doesn’t lose her nerve, she continues to know that she has been sexually harassed (no matter how much scepticism or gaslighting she encounters).So what? If this woman refuses to abide by judicial protocols her testimony will be inadmissible. What possible satisfaction can one derive in knowing one has been the victim of an unpunished crime if one refuses to report it in a proper manner?
There is no 'hard nosed externalism' here. This is soft headed sentimentalism which weeps copious tears for Simone de Beauvoir who was used as a chair by every Parisian male too cheap to buy two sticks of furniture just as billions of women all over the world are used as chairs to this very day!
This seems to be to be the right thing to say, both in terms of my intuitive judgment about the case, but also in terms of what sort of epistemology we want for politics. It seems right to me, both theoretically and politically, to say that this woman continues to know that she has been sexually harassed, and thus continues to act rationally when she pursues her protest. In other words, it seems right to me, both theoretically and politically, to say that oppressed people have substantial epistemological advantages over their oppressors.Really?! Consider the case of a refugee who is raped in the 'Humanitarian' Camp where she has been incarcerated. She has a substantial epistemological advantage because she does not know the language of her oppressors nor whom to complain to nor what protections are offered to her by the Law. Amia thinks that the guys who say to each other 'let's go rape that woman' don't know they are raping her because of Patriarchy or Capitalism or whatever. Actually, they do know it. What's more, they know it in advance. The epistemological advantage is with the oppressor, not the oppressed.
This gets us to what I see as a serious question in political epistemology: how to strike the right balance between getting onto the genuine epistemic injustices that are wrought by oppression – of the kind that Miranda Fricker and Kristie Dotson have recently written about – but also how to vindicate the privileged knowledge of the oppressed.Privileged knowledge?! Priceless! But, Amia, if it is so privileged, why does it need vindication?
My own instinct is to go far more Marxian than Jason does. Perhaps the underlying reason here has to do with our different views of elite ideology: while Jason seems to think that the elite are constantly battling counterevidence to their ideological worldviews, and thus are at least theoretically capable of ideological reform, I’m tempted to be far less optimistic. On the other hand, I’m far more optimistic than Jason, I think, about the epistemological resources available to the oppressed. Jason sees the oppressed as epistemological victims, and the elite as epistemological miscreants who might still be reformed. Whereas I see the elite position as one of near hopeless epistemological perversity, and the oppressed position as the only genuine site of epistemological hope.Wonderful! So good to know you have Hope in your heart! But, Amia, what if these oppressed people beat the shite out of their oppressors and thus stop being oppressed? Then your genuine site of epistemological hope will vanish. You will have to admit that your entire project is hopeless.
Of course, Marxists and Marxist feminists never thought that the epistemic privilege of the proletariat or women amounted to automatic access to the truth about political and social reality. As both Lukacs and Hartsock are keen to emphasise, the proletariat and feminist standpoints must be achieved. By this they do not mean simply that the proletariat and women must overcome false consciousness in order to achieve revolutionary consciousness. Of course they do mean this. But they also mean that the proletariat and women must achieve their enlightened standpoint through political revolution. And it’s to the question of revolution that I would like to now, finally, turn.So, Amia wants women to be raped and poor people to be oppressed because otherwise a revolution would be pointless. But, only a revolution would let raped women achieve the feminist standpoint- which, it turns out, is that they should be raped till the revolution occurs. So the choice is clear- either the oppressed must be canon-fodder to the Revolution or they must be raped and brutalized so that that Revolution is desirable... for Amia.
In the conclusion of his book, Jason anticipates a possible misreading: namely, that he dismisses or ignores the “importance of social movements in articulating and acting against inequalities and injustices of various sorts” (292). Jason wants to underscore the importance, as he sees it, of “human agency, carefully crafted appeals, consciousness-raising of various sorts and at differing levels….cultural and artistic innovations and aesthetic challenges, years of human labor, blood, death, suffering, dreams, direct collective action” (293). And yet Jason rightly wants to remind us how often political efforts are co-opted by and subsumed under the reigning ideology – how the supposed completion of a fight for justice often masks ongoing injustice. The constant invocation of Martin Luther King amongst defenders of white supremacy is an obvious case in point.WTF? The Aryan Brotherhood are constantly invoking MLK? What is this lady smoking?
In all this I think Jason is right, and I want to be careful not to misrepresent him in just the way he anticipates. But still I want to ask: why not revolution?Coz Revolutions fuck up poor people. Some worthless windbags get to strut around for a bit, but they soon either get shot by their own people or else run away to some nice Liberal Democracy.
Why the lingering hope that the elites will come to their senses, will see the contradictions between democracy and inequality, and change their oppressive ways?The history of Liberal Democracies shows that elites do come to their senses- if only out of a desire to uphold the Rule of Law and prevent their own scapegoating.
As I’ve already suggested, I think part of the answer lies in Jason’s fundamental optimism about elites, for all his serious criticism and evident contempt. This is what motivates, I earlier suggested, his desire to formulate an internal critique of American society – a critique that will reveal to elites the tension between their democratic aspirations and their embrace of inequality. But perhaps there is also Jason’s optimism about philosophy at work here. It would be really nice for philosophers – at least those of us who care about injustice and oppression – if what was needed was better and more careful argumentation in order to rationally persuade ourselves out of bad ideology: if we as analytic philosophers had just the right hammer for the nail.Jason is an American critiquing an Elite he has grown up with. So he is 'internal' whereas Amia is 'external' because most women of her color are very poor and live in her ancestral South Asia. This causes us to wonder- what great revolution is Amia spearheading? Are there tumbrils passing down Gower Street? Is the swish of the Guillotine heard in the precincts of All Souls? Are the poorer class of South Asian origin women in Britain acting the role of a collective Madame Defarge?
I’m not saying that philosophy has little or no effect on political reality. It’s a very difficult thing to say, after all, just how political change happens, and without knowing that, it’s hard to know what role philosophy might and should play in that change.Sheer nonsense. We know very well how political change happens- which is why elites in countries with good paideia manage such change without stupid revolutions of the sort Amia is enamoured with. Part of good paideia is having the intellectual equivalent of drunken helots on hand to demonstrate to young gentlemen and gentlewomen the dangers of Sophistic inebriety. That's where Gayatri & Amia and so on come in.
But I fear that the thought that what we need, politically speaking, is analytic philosophy – and in particular the tools of analytic epistemology and philosophy of language – is one more legitimation myth of which we should be suspicious.Fair point. Analytic philosophy is silly. But then, so is a Marxism that is ignorant of Mathematical Economics- in which case it is merely absurd.
After all, it would be convenient for us as professional philosophers not only if our somewhat peculiar skills turned out to be essential for the pursuit of justice, but also if it turned out that the use of those skills could render political revolution, especially violent revolution, unnecessary. For, if the revolution did come, surely many of us here would have much to lose.Nonsense! Nobody gives a toss about the lot of you. You guys aren't paid a lot of money. All we ask of you is that you don't masturbate in front of your students and try to distract them from doing so too incessantly. Pedants, after all, have their uses. Not everybody can make cat like noises you know.
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