Thesis advisor: Margaret E. Guider / Thesis advisor: Daniel J. Daly / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Leading accounts of responsibility for structural injustice endorse the idea that all members of an unjust social structure—including those who are oppressed—bear a forward-looking responsibility to help combat structural injustice. Importantly, this idea assumes that all oppressed agents are capable of consciously combating structural injustice. But there exist oppressed agents, which I term 'denialists', who deny the existence of the wrongs that they and other members of their social group(s) experience in virtue of being subject to structural injustice. Initially, it seems doubtful that a denialist can consciously combat structural injustice—what could they possibly do to consciously combat wrongs whose existence they reject? This may lead one to think that a denialist cannot be held responsible for helping combat structural injustice, so that the aforementioned accounts must be revised. In this paper, I show that such revision is not needed. Despite initial appearances, a denialist can be held responsible for helping combat structural injustice. To establish this claim, I first argue that two criteria—feasibleness and plausible effectiveness—jointly generate pro tanto responsibilities to help fix structural injustice for oppressed agents. Then, I argue that these criteria entail that a denialist has a pro tanto responsibility to listen to others' claims of wrongdoing. / Master of Arts / Some oppressed people deny the existence of the wrongs that they and others like them experience in virtue of being oppressed. For instance, a woman might think it is ok for men to objectify women, and thus deny that a woman is wronged when she is sexually harassed. Call such oppressed people 'denialists'. Many philosophers hold that the oppressed are responsible for combating their oppression. One might think that a denialist cannot bear this responsibility. After all, how can a denialist combat wrongs whose existence they deny? I argue, however, that a denialist can be held responsible for combating their oppression. Specifically, I argue that a denialist is responsible for listening to other people when they talk about the wrongs they perceive.

Our emotions tell us that something is happening. When we experience or express an emotion, it is a reaction to a situation that is happening to or around us. This thesis project seeks to address the social and political inequalities that obstruct certain individuals and groups from being able to access and express the unique form of information that emotions provide. Emotional epistemic injustice concerns the ways in which our emotions can be used against us as an epistemic agent along gendered, racial, and ableist lines. Our capacity as a knower is influenced by social rules – and these same social rules dictate which kind of people can feel what, and in which situations. The first two chapters of this project are focused on identifying and analyzing two existing kinds of emotional epistemic injustice – misogynistic emotion reframing and emotional epistemic exploitation. By explicitly acknowledging these phenomena, I provide two new actionable hermeneutical resources, demonstrate the significance of our emotional experiences, and establish the need for a recategorization of emotions as a significant and unique source of information. The third and final chapter focuses on how this recategorization can be done. By specifically identifying socio-epistemically significant emotions, I argue for the recategorization of emotions as an invitation to further investigation of our experiences within the context of existing social and political inequalities. Our emotions, both felt and expressed, have the potential to be powerful tools for real social and political change – and in order for them to have this impact, they must be embraced as their own unique and significant source of information. / Thesis / Master of Philosophy (MA) / The primary goal of this thesis project is to formally acknowledge the role of emotions in how we are able to acquire and contribute to knowledge construction, and successfully communicate said knowledge to others. Our gender, race, sexuality, socio-economic status, and ability all influence how we are allowed to express our emotions, and to what extent they will receive uptake from a given audience. These social feeling rules allow others to “justifiably” dismiss the information our emotions are signaling based on our social position, and results in the expression of emotion being used to undermine our reason-based testimony or communication as well. By identifying two specific ways in which this is already happening via misogynistic emotion reframing and emotional epistemic exploitation, as well as presenting a new way of categorizing our emotions as unique forms of information, I will demonstrate that the information our emotions provide can be a powerful tool for real social and political change.

This dissertation adopts a ‘social criticism’ model in order to analyze racism in our contemporary world – particularly the United States. This analysis offers a detailed account of racism as rooted in social structural processes, and prioritizes oppression and domination as the chief wrongs resulting from racism. To do so, said analysis highlights norms, ideals, policies, and actions, that are often assumed to be ‘race neutral’ (e.g., impartiality, merit, ‘natural rights’, and autonomy), and the role they play in the production of racial injustice. More specifically, it exposes how these norms function to undermine human agency by restricting means for self-development and self-determination. As such, the role that inclusive and democratic deliberation can play in combating racial oppression and domination is developed. In light of this analysis, a defense of a ‘concrete morality’ which prioritizes the fight against oppression and domination, is made against an ‘abstract morality’ that adheres to ‘ideally just’ principles regardless of the injustice that results from doing so. Moreover, this project develops a ‘shared responsibility model’ for racial injustice, articulating varying degrees and kinds of responsibility we have for correcting it. It concludes by offering ‘democratic equality of difference’ as a normative ideal for cultivating racial justice. Generally, said ideal aims to: create basic conditions for the self-development and collective self-determination of all; cultivate a universally inclusive and ongoing process of democratic deliberation for solving collective problems; and attend to difference when deliberating about matters of justice. / Philosophy

I argue that talking about aesthetic injustice implies reflection about some failures on the exercise of aesthetic judgment due to mechanisms of oppression, which have a negative impact on the development of potential aesthetic agents.  I claim that mechanisms of oppression like aesthetic identity prejudice, oppression or lack of recognition of sensitivities, and aesthetic dysfunctionality in sites of enunciation continue undermining the degree of validation of potential aesthetic agents - who mostly belong to historical oppressed groups like women, black people, indigenous, native Americans, among others.  Overall, my aim is to analyze how these mechanisms of oppression continue undermining, marginalizing, and immobilizing the development of potential aesthetic agents. My proposal resides in the idea that these mechanisms of oppression enable aesthetic injustice on three levels: testimonial aesthetic injustice, hermeneutical aesthetic injustice, and aesthetic dysfunction.

Daniel Butt develops an account of corrective responsibilities borne by beneficiaries of injustice. He defends the consistency model. I criticize the vagueness in this model and present two interpretations of benefit from injustice (BFI) responsibilities: obligation and natural duty. The obligation model falls prey to the involuntariness objection. I defend a natural duties model, discussing how natural duties can be circumstantially perfected into directed duties and showing how the natural duties model avoids the involuntariness objection. I also address objections from structural injustice and demandingness.

No description available.

Rectificatory justice for colonialism has been, in recent years, included in the discussion of global justice. The idea is that former colonial powers acknowledge, apologise and make reparations for the harms caused during colonialism. However, there are some objections to rectificatory justice for colonialism. This paper examines one of the main objections, the counterfactual argument. This objection has been found to have some plausibility due to the difficulty in estimating the effect of past injustice on present conditions, as well as the claim that African countries did indeed benefit from colonialism. However, due to the exploitative nature of colonialism, it is reasonable to argue for rectificatory justice based solely on the harm caused, without having to conceptualise a world without the occurrence of colonialism. The aim of this paper is to claim that the harms of colonialism are partly to blame for the current global inequality and that rectificatory justice will go a long way in decreasing this inequality.

This dissertation examines the rhetoric employed by Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin who devise a top-down/bottom-up dialectic of social-justice writing which can be read as grassroots advocacy. The authors write with two constant goals in mind: from the top down, they decry systemic forms of injustice; and from the bottom up, they make the experiences of victims visible. Scholarship on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, and Things as They are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, has often focused on assessing the degree to which each text concerns itself with democratic equal rights. By contrast, this project explicates how the writers collectively define social injustice for the late eighteenth century. The writers simultaneously voice their indignation against those moral and socio-economic wrongs; deconstruct assumptions of natural inferiority and social disrespect; demand extensive change to social foundations; assert the humanity of women, workers, and slaves; and empathize with other oppressed populations across their traditionally conceived genres of vindication, slave narrative, and novel. Ultimately, my work incorporates a lexicon of political philosophy, political theory, and grassroots advocacy into literary studies to show how Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin not only recognize corresponding patterns of oppression but also utilize strikingly similar literary devices and rhetorical strategies by which to combat injustice. All three authors share the same fundamental aim— to transform the dismal existence of the oppressed groups they represent.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:25:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007-08-30Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:25:29Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 mizusaki_rac_me_prud.pdf: 847979 bytes, checksum: 0611b83cd84721035135f89120d91983 (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Esta pesquisa investigou as representações sociais e os julgamentos morais sobre injustiças que alunos(as) de escolas particulares e públicas do município de Presidente Prudente (SP) fizeram em situações escolares verificando a influência, nessas cognições, de diferentes pertinências sociais (idade, sexo, escolas particulares ou públicas). Para análise teórica, foram utilizadas as abordagens da Psicologia do Desenvolvimento Moral de Piaget, Kohlberg e Gilligan e das Representações Sociais criada por Moscovici. Como procedimentos metodológicos, foram realizadas observações em salas de quinta série do ensino fundamental e primeira do ensino médio e foi aplicado um questionário que continha várias indagações sobre injustiças na escola. Como resultados das observações, verificou-se que queixas espontâneas de injustiças que ocorrem no interior da escola foram freqüentes tanto em meninos quanto em meninas. Considerando como queixas de injustiças aquelas queixas dos alunos que se incluíam nos diferentes tipos de injustiças apontados por Piaget, quais sejam, injustiça legal, retributiva, distributiva e social, verificamos que na escola particular na 5ª. série as queixas identificadas foram, em primeiro lugar, do tipo distributiva e, em menor proporção, queixas do tipo retributiva. Na escola pública foram comuns queixas do tipo distributiva. Na escola particular, na 1ª. série do ensino médio, foram freqüentes queixas do tipo distributivo, e, em menor proporção, queixas do tipo retributiva. Na escola pública, nesta série, não foram identificadas queixas de injustiças que se enquadrassem nas categorias de injustiças propostas por Piaget e Kohlberg. Apareceram, também, queixas, tanto em escolas particulares quanto na pública, que apontaram o descontentamento dos(as) alunos(as) em relação aos aspectos pedagógicos. / This research investigated the social representations and the moral judgements about injustices that private and public schools students (boys and girls) of the municipal district of Presidente Prudente (SP) did in school situations, verifying the influence, in those cognitions, of different social pertinences (age, sex, private or public schools). For theoretical analysis, it were utilized the approaches of the Moral Development Psychology of Piaget, Kohlberg and Gilligan, and of the Social Representations created by Moscovici. As methodological procedures, observations were accomplished at rooms from 5th grade of the fundamental school and first of the high school, and it was applied a questionnaire that contained several inquiries about injustices at school. As results of the observations, it was verified that spontaneous complaints of injustice that happen inside the school were frequent both in boys and in girls. Considering as injustice complaints those students complaints that included in the differents injustices types indicated by Piaget, which are, legal injustice, retributive, distributive and social, verified at private school on the 5th grade the complaints identified were, in first place, distributive and, in smaller proportion, complaints of the retributive type. At public school were usual complaints of the distributive type. At private school, on the 1 th grade of the high school, were frequent complaints of the distributive type, and, in smaller proportion, complaints of the retributive type. At public school, in on this grade, were not identified injustice complaints that framed in the injustice categories proposed by Piaget and Kohlberg. Appeared, also, complaints, both at private schools and at public school, that indicated the students dissatisfaction in relation to the pedagogic aspects.