I think it's right to say that by having long past by and furthering patriarchal norms,
it seems wrong and far too strong to say that like I have a duty not to.
You're listening to podcasts, a podcast from modern college University of Oxford, bringing you interviews, seminars and stories from our community.
Welcome to Episode eight. My name's Martin. I work in communications.
So what in college? In this episode, I talked to Cora Appleman, a modern student in her third year studying.
She won the college's change prize for her essay on the philosophy of social justice.
Congratulations to Connor. We talk through the ideas and themes, pressing questions like What does it take for us to be free people?
And How should we think about our desires? One desires formed by oppressive social structures.
We'll dive in a moment. But before we roll the episode. Be aware that at various points in the conversation with directly sexual assault and abuse.
Thanks for joining me today to discuss your essay and broader issues around philosophy and justice.
Maybe you can start by just sharing a bit about who you are, what you do, what, and what you study.
So I'm. I'm Caro. I'm in my third year studying pay, although economics was dropped a while ago now, so it feels like a bit of a distant memory.
And yeah, outside of my degree in the RA, I was running my degree in women's officer with my friend Nia,
more generally, often with Nia and other peers.
And some of those kind of hold up a modern library or I go to as you go through quite a lot.
So we're going to be talking about your Cheney prizewinning essay.
Essay deals with issues of freedom and social justice, issues like what does it take for us to be free people?
And you defend a particular theory of social justice.
But before we get into the particulars of that theory, there might be some people listening who wonder why theorise about social justice at all.
Why not just go out and tackle it? Easy question.
I mean, I'm not going to try and make out that my undergrad essay is somehow equivalent to like
political protest or actually taking a more active stance on issues of injustice.
And also, I guess at the end of the day, a large part of the reason why I wrote the essays,
just because I think it's quite interesting, but I'd like to think that it's not completely irrelevant either.
I guess specifically this essay is kind of looking at cases where it seems like there's an injustice involved somewhere,
but it's not actually obvious what that is and what is kind of responsible for the injustice.
And so it's not clear what kind of just going out there and tackling it would look like riot.
We didn't first think about why is this unjust in way is it and just so maybe it's of some value.
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
One thing I was thinking about as I read your essay is just that, as you pointed out, it's not always clear in a given case, a,
whether there is injustice going on or if there is, what is the source of the injustice that what makes that particular event or interaction unjust?
And so you kind of don't really know what tool to apply to something if you don't know what the problem is exactly.
And maybe Theorising can help us get a clearer grasp of what the problem is.
Maybe, maybe we'll say and hopefully but let's assume that we're on board for some theorising, at least for the purposes of the podcast.
The particular theory of social justice you defend is called the Republican theory of Social Justice.
Could you explain what that theory is and maybe clarify what Republican means in this context?
Yeah. So it's not us Republicanism, if that's the that worry.
So in this context, it's basically like a theory of social justice as obtaining where people have freedom in their interpersonal relationships.
But freedom's understood in quite a specific way as not being dominated.
So this idea of like freedom of non domination and domination occurs,
I would say would dominate be if a has the capacity to interfere in these choices in a way that B doesn't control.
So the Republican view doesn't require that we're never interfered with.
It just requires that when we're interfered with, it's kind of on our terms.
Is that right? Yeah. So can you explain a bit more about what the difference would be,
maybe using example between being interfered with, not on your terms and being interfered with on your terms?
Yes, I'm I'm going to say, Philip Pettit, I always want to say pity, but I have his name.
But Philip Pettit, who sort of founded Republicanism and has this quite famous example of like an alcohol covered case.
So say you decide that you don't want to drink for the next week and you look
with alcohol in a cupboard and you give me the key and you're like Karl Rove, no matter what I say to you, don't give this back to me.
If in two days time you then come back and ask for the key, and I say, No,
I'm interfering with your choices because I'm preventing you from choosing to go and drink.
But I'm doing so on terms that you laid out. Basically, I'm doing it under your instructions.
And so that interference would count as controlled for Pettit.
And it has quite interesting implications in terms of like on a state level,
because Pettit basically tries to argue that democracy counts as the citizens controlling the states interference if it's.
Yeah, right. Autocracy. Yeah. If it's sufficiently democratic.
Yeah. So yeah, there definitely cases in Republicanism where you can interfere and that's not seen as like inhibiting anyone's freedom.
That's really interesting. Why do you prefer the Republican theory as any other theory on the Republican theory of justice?
You're dominated if you were exposed to somebodies capacity to interfere with you.
But because even if they don't actually interfere,
but they just have the power to essentially that still counts as domination on a Republican account.
So it's quite different from, say, that liberalism in that sense, which focuses more purely on non interferences.
And so long as people don't interfere with your choices, you'll, you'll find your free Republicanism can capture, I think,
more successfully in cases where we feel like there's something unjust, but there isn't any actual interference.
So I would say if you have a society where say that marital rape were legal and socially condoned, and so it's kind of structurally.
It and it's not really punished.
Liberalism might see that as bad and it might say, Hey, we should criminalise this and we should kind of socially sanction this.
But it's reason for doing so would just be that in cases where a wife were raped by her husband, she would be therefore interfered with.
It's kind of a ridiculously academic way of talking about that,
and that would be objectionable Republicanism and kind of go one step further and
say just the fact that it have the power to is objectionable in and of itself.
And where he acts on that power, that's worse.
And that's a kind of a greater injustice.
But we should criminalise and socially sanction this, not just to try and minimise the chances or the probability of interference occurring,
but because even if interference never occurred, just living under that power is objectionable.
Okay, great. That's really helpful. But what your essay deals with is a problem that the Republican theory faces, like a particular objection.
Can you explain what the problem is? Yeah, so I can talk about it is but the problem from adaptive preferences and so adaptive preferences,
I am roughly defining as where the options that are available to someone are limited by that oppression.
And so that preference is formed in response to that repression.
The sort of running example is where women have a sexual preference for their own subordination,
but that preference is formed by patriarchal social conditioning.
I think there are, yeah,
such sort of strong patriarchal conditioning into these roles that a lot of women do basically prefer subordination in various ways.
So, I mean, probably the stuff that comes to mind is like more of acid type thing, but also there's a lot broader than that.
I might also be kind of preference for a man to initiate a day rather than a woman or a man to be the one that proposes rather than the woman.
So I think it's actually quite widespread. Right. Okay.
Yes. So we have these adaptive preferences and the concept of then preferences are genuine preferences of the person who has them,
but nonetheless, they have been shaped by oppressive social structures.
So why do these adaptive preferences cause a problem for the Republican theory of justice?
So because, like I spoke about earlier on, the Republican theory of justice, interference is only problematic.
It only counts as dominating if it's not controlled by the person.
There'll be lots of cases where adaptive preferences might lead someone to prefer and then say consent to or initiate interferences,
say a particular sexual act where they might not have consented to it if it weren't for having adaptive preferences.
But nonetheless they do consent. And intuitively that seems like a case where they control that interference, just like in the alcohol covered case.
And so that's not necessarily the wrong well, I'm going to argue is not the wrong verdict.
But it does seem to suggest that Republicanism just has nothing to say about what's unjust in, for example,
women choosing to be sexually subordinate or people acting on their adaptive preferences more generally.
Yes, say it's fine following. Then when we look at a case of an adaptive preference at work,
like a woman preferring to be sexually submissive and consenting to sexual acts that put her in that submissive position,
there seems to be intuitively there's something in just like around this territory,
but it seems, at least on first glance, that the Republican theory cannot capture or say anything about the injustice,
because it seems like in the details of the case,
the conditions for a trust or free relationship are satisfied that the person is acting of a genuine desire.
And, you know, if they're consenting to a sexual act that puts them in a submissive position,
yeah, they're being interfered with, but it's on the basis of their genuine preferences.
And so we have a situation where intuitively we still want to say there's something in just about us.
After all, the preferences are kind of formed by these oppressive structures,
but it's not clear what the Republican view can actually say about that injustice.
Yes. So okay, you're summarising this eloquently, but I would it in the first place.
But yeah, that's exactly it. Q You want into defending the Republican view from this objection?
You think that there is. Like a good way of critiquing the objection, but there's also a way to respond that you don't think is ultimately successful.
Yes. So what's the. The wrong way to defend the Republican view?
So I think the wrong way is to try and argue that acting on adaptive preferences and any
interference consented to based on them actually is unjust on a Republican account.
So you could try and kind of push back against this idea that consent equals
control and sort of say actually where consent is based on adaptive preferences,
it doesn't. And therefore, because it would be uncontrolled interference, it would be domination, it would be unjust.
All right. So sorry to jump in. So you're saying that according to this response,
if you're consenting to saying on the basis of your adaptive preferences, it's not really on your terms.
Yeah. Yeah. So that would be exactly it. You'd have to try and argue that it's not really the agent's true choice.
Yes. So I think that this response is quite problematic because on the face of it,
there just clearly are cases where consent does control the interference.
So like we were the case as we were just speaking about where someone consents to submissive sexual acts but say,
you know, that partner wouldn't do that unless they were to consent. It seems pretty clear there that they do control that.
And so to try and argue that even in such cases it's actually not the agent,
but instead kind of the social restrictions which are shaping that preferences.
That controls the interference, denies the agency of the person involved,
and denies the fact that from the inside it still feels just like that preferences and that choosing to act on them and also seems to kind of elide
the distinction between someone consenting to an interference where their consent is based on adaptive preferences and someone just not consenting.
Because either way it would be the patriarchal social structures which give their
sexual partner that capacity to interfere rather than their choice or their consent.
And I think that hopefully it's obvious that those are two very different cases.
Yeah, never. That seems right. So let's grant that that that's not a very promising avenue for defending Republican.
So what is a more promising route?
So I think and try to argue, not so sure if I succeed on this one, but Republicanism can still say that there is an injustice involved.
It's not sort of left with nothing to say by recognising that when adaptive preferences are formed, that formation itself is dominating.
And so even then, if people go on to choose X, Y or Z on the basis of those preferences that need not constitute domination,
that is still domination, and therefore kind of a Republican idea of injustice involved.
Yeah. So that sounds like what initially motivated this problem was that intuitively, there's something in just in this like territory roughly.
And you're saying, okay, what the Republican can do is say we shouldn't locate the injustice in like a particular act of consent.
So it shouldn't we shouldn't locate the injustice when, for instance,
a woman via her adaptive preferences consents to a sexually submissive act and where we should locate the injustice and so say
there's something right about our intuitions is in the fact that those adaptive preferences were formed in the first place.
Yeah. Okay. You said you're not 100% sure that your response succeeds.
What are the concerns that you have about it? So kind of up until now and at the beginning when I was explaining what domination is,
it's sort of this idea that personhood dominates Person B when they have this
capacity for uncontrolled interference and where adaptive preferences are formed.
It might not be that there is any person who dominates.
So it might be that, you know, that's the agent.
And just through kind of seemingly ostensibly innocuous social structures, like the way that the brought up, the kind of films that we see,
books that we read or present as such that women ought to be more passive and then ought to be more active and dominant.
And so thereby this person acquires adaptive preferences.
It's not very obvious here that there's only one in particular who dominates her.
So to explain how it is still domination, I think we need to have this concept of systemic domination,
which is the idea that someone can be dominated because they.
Systematically disempowered relative to other agents, even if there aren't any other agents are actually doing the dominating.
And I think that this does work as a response in saying that the formation of adaptive preferences is unjust.
What I'm less sure about is whether it remains unjust because it involves domination
or whether it kind of collapses into maybe another thing like oppression.
Right. Right. That's interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, the concern here is that what started off as an account that.
Framed in justice as a relationship between two people, the two persons.
Now, to maintain your response, you kind of have to say that injustice can occur between a person and this slightly more like
a diffuse group of people when no one agent bears the full brunt of any responsibility,
but they all kind of participate slightly in some way.
Yeah, exactly. Which I think is a good thing insofar as I think that much more accurately captures how
injustices sort of perpetrated a lot of the time and of how it permeates through society.
But. I guess the worry would be that what made domination this like distinct concept in
the first place was this idea of a kind of paradigm like master slave relationship,
where there's someone kind of imposing their will on somebody else.
So I don't think that it's. Like a flaw of a theory of social justice to focus on the diffuse ways that power can be exercised over people.
But it might just be that I kind of fail to vindicate Republicanism as that.
Right. Maybe it maybe the theory has transformed into a different theory.
Maybe. And I'm still hoping not. Yeah, that is that is interesting.
And one of the things that you address in the longer form of your essay, which I read is.
An objection or a concern that I had upon my second read of your essay, and then you addressed what I was concerned about so low down.
And I was thinking, Yeah, but you know, none of our preferences are entirely free from social control.
So it has to be. What makes the formation of an adaptive preference unjust has to be more than just that.
The person didn't autonomously create them in some like social voids.
Yes. To be so distinct from that. So yeah, I think you appealed to some particular criteria that make adaptive preferences,
the formation of them an injustice, but not some other preferences.
Yeah. So yeah, exactly what you're saying. I mean, basically all of our preferences are influenced by our social conditions.
I mean, I think I mentioned earlier, let's say someone who votes based on what their parents vote on or yeah,
if my music taste is influenced by the kind of music that my friends listen to, that kind of thing.
Yeah. So there are cases like that where it's very obvious that social conditioning is involved,
but we very much wouldn't want to say that that makes the person kind of dominated or that constitutes kind of social injustice.
I think we can differentiate cases of adaptive preference formation from this kind of more innocuous preference formation,
because where adaptive preferences are formed,
it is the case that the person who forms their adaptive preferences is kind of systematically
disempowered relative to another group that's empowered by their having that preference.
And so to kind of give an example, if a woman forms a preference for sexual subordination kind of indirectly,
we can say that that empowers men because it's feeding into patriarchal norms where women are submissive and those norms privilege men.
And so there's a sense in which by performing adaptive preferences,
not only is she not in control of her preference formation, but also others are kind of given power relative to her.
So yeah, the idea is that adaptive preferences, unlike some other, more innocuous kinds of preferences formed by society,
are that these are ones which end up giving one group power over another.
I might misconstruing that. That is what I just said, but I'm just debating whether or not that's what I want to say.
Okay. Right.
So so I think what I want to try and argue is that kind of regardless of the consequences in the very process of adaptive preference formation,
one group is empowered relative to the person whose preferences that are and potentially that social group who are disempowered.
So I say in the essay, I tried to use this, this idea of objectification, which is I mean,
it satisfies definition and it's quite technical that basically the idea is that if one group of persons has like social power over another,
then the way that they want someone to be might force that person to actually become that way.
So I think quite something along the lines of like men wanting women to be subordinate, forces them to become subordinate.
And I think that with a suitably loose understanding of what we mean by force here,
I think it is actually quite plausible that the fact that it's benefited men for women to be submissive and for men to have more
power relative to them has meant that we have masses of media in which that is kind of romanticised or eroticized or promoted,
and therefore people's preferences are kind of formed according to that.
And it's the case that men's preferences are also formed according to that.
But in such a case, it's like the way that men want.
The idea would be men wanting men to be dominant causes men to become dominant.
Yeah. Whereas if that's the sort of parallel quote,
so there's not the same like disempowerment relative to another group that there would be in the case of men and women to be subordinate forces.
Women to become subordinate. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
We're definitely going to have to explain like some relevant difference between the formation of adaptive preferences and just any of preferences.
And what you described strikes me as as good a way as any to make that distinction.
I think in my mind it returns a little bit to the worry that you have that maybe at the end of this you get a really great theory of justice,
but it's just not the Republican one.
But yeah, the reason I say that, my concern is that according to the Republican theory of justice, you know what can.
Make something unjust. Is this interference of another agent?
Not on their terms. And that might be fine. Like that might be sufficient to make something unjust,
but it's not clear now that that's necessary just because in the case of adaptive preference formation,
it seems like what we're appealing to now is something a little different, something like power exertion,
where we're no longer talking about terms, whether it's on anyone's terms, I could be entirely mistaken.
No, I feel like that's a good point. I will try and let push back the other side.
So far, Republicanism is sort of always about power insofar as it's the capacity for uncontrolled interference problematic.
And I think that is relevant in the case of adoptive parents, will make sure that it's not on the person's terms.
So if it were the case that I could consent to how my preferences are formed.
Yeah. And thereby determine the conditions on which my preferences were formed.
If I could sort of say, oh yeah, I, I'm really happy to be influenced by patriarchal structures such that I would prefer to have long hair.
Then I could say, well, nothing's interfered with me in a way that I haven't controlled.
I think that because our preferences dictate what we choose in the first place,
it's just not intelligible that we could control the way that our preferences are formed by, say, patriarchal structures.
So I think that that so is doing some work.
Yeah, that's how fleshly I think I follow that. I think the mistake I was making was in thinking that.
Okay, because. Like necessarily.
You are sort of consenting to your preference formation that the.
That your lack of consent was morally irrelevant in that case.
On the Republican theory, you kind of need like two things.
You need some like interference, say, some kind of exercise of power say.
And you need for that to not be on your terms, for that to be just out of mind.
The only mistake is that you don't need that to be an actual exercise of the power or the capacity.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. True, true. True. When it comes to adaptive preferences,
they are necessarily subject to the not on your terms condition in the same way
that any desires which are formed by societal influences satisfy that condition.
So that condition is almost trivially satisfied.
But in the case of adaptive preferences and not more innocuous preferences, you also get this capacity or exercise of power over you.
Well, I have to say, I think your response succeeds to my worry. So that's not more confident than I am.
But that's nice. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that summed it up helpful, actually.
Cool. Well, let's try things together.
What does all this show us about justice more. More broadly? Scary question.
I think it raises some quite interesting questions about the extent of our responsibility to combat injustice.
But I think on the face of it would want to say that wherever we are responsible for perpetuating injustice,
we ought not to do that and we ought to act differently. But once we see that, once we see those very convoluted way of serving, what argument works?
If we see that the formation of adaptive preferences is unjust,
then there are so many kind of small and seemingly harmless ways that we all contribute to forming one another's adaptive preferences all the time.
And like I mentioned earlier, I have long hair. Like if I have a daughter and I'm wearing makeup and have my hat on,
then that might reinforce to her that that's how women ought to dress and that one of them perpetuates patriarchal norms.
And so I think it's right to say that by having long hair, I am furthering patriarchal norms.
It seems wrong. I'm far too strong to say that, like I have a duty not to.
How dare you? So I think there's some interesting questions that are about kind of more broadly.
Do our actions have to be harmful in order for us to have a duty not to act
in that way or where we kind of contribute to injustice in more subtle ways?
Yes. What's our responsibility for not doing that right now?
That's a really good, good question. And to end on a lighter note, what's your favourite thing about water?
The people? Can I say that? Yes, absolutely can. And they're the lovely people of order.
Wonderful outside. And yeah, if people want to get in touch with you over to chat about your ideas or to reach out
to you in your role as women's officer in the see how is best for them to do that.
Probably email me. I mean, my water, my emails, just my name or if it was about women's stuff there's an that's you don't women email.
Yeah sure. I'll include your email in the show notes.
Great. And congratulations again on winning the essay prize.
And thank you for sharing it with the modern community.
Thanks for your time. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening.
If you have any comments or feedback about what cast, we'd love to hear from you and continue improving the show.
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