Unfreedom for All: How the World's Injustices Harm YouIt is often said that we live under systems of injustice. But if so, who ought to combat them, and why? Many in the world's liberal elite hold that only the perpetrators or the victims have such duties, because of their special connections to the injustice. Others hold that all of the privileged have them, because they have duties to relieve suffering or to redress their complicity in the injustice. This book challenges those answers. It argues that everyone living under such injustices ought to combat them: victim, perpetrator, and bystander alike. Moreover, they all have the same reason for doing so: such injustices suppress everyone's resistance to their workings. But there is a name for such suppression: "authoritarianism." Hence such injustices make everyone unfree, because they subject everyone to authoritarian tactics. The book thus reinterprets and defends a core doctrine of the global left, "No one is free while others are oppressed!" For it shows how oppression subjects everyone--including you--to arbitrary power. The book argues that systematic injustice occurs when one group finds that its political voice is unjustly marginalized, its members exploited and subject to systematic violence, and that society's dominant norms unjustly favor a privileged group. It diagnoses three global injustices of this kind: gender, race, and poverty. It then shows how such injustices always suppress everyone's resistance to them, making everyone unfree. But if so, it argues, then this shared unfreedom should be the ground on which victims, bystanders, and perpetrators unite in solidarity against injustice. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
PART I Misdiagnosing InjusticeAnd Its Remedies | 25 |
PART II Injustice and Your Freedom | 93 |
PART III The Harms of Global Injustices | 151 |
PART IV A Theory of Solidarity | 233 |
Notes | 259 |
273 | |
293 | |
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Common terms and phrases
abolish agents arbitrary power argues authoritarian authoritarian tactics bystanders capabilities approach central challenge injustice chapter claim Claimed-authority collective consider cultural cultural imperialism depersonized diagnoses domination duty to challenge economic elites equality established authority example exploitation freedom global injustices global poor global racial global society global white supremacy group responsibility Hegel-Douglass theory Hence injustice’s institutions Jim Crow John Rawls join in solidarity justice liberal democracy Maafa mainstream liberalism male supremacy marginal men’s mestizo Mills moral Moreover negative freedom non-ideal theory non-victims norms nosology one’s oppression’s oppressors outcome responsibility patriarchy people’s perpetrators person Pogge political theory potential resistance privileged race racial groups racially dark racially white racially yellow Rawls reason received view remedial social injustice society’s solidarity special connection Structural Injustice suffer systematic injustice thesis tradition’s ultimate harm unfree universal unfreedom unjust unjustly victims World Values Survey world’s World’s Women worldwide