Affective Injustice and Moral Responsibility

This dissertation contributes to feminist critiques of moral responsibility by exposing cases where asymmetries of blame perpetuate oppression by diminishing or disabling the moral agency of individuals from traditionally subordinated social groups. It also engages the recent literature on “affective injustice,” briefly defined as a wrong done to someone at the level of their emotional life. Chapter two details how cultural domination produces alienation from a community, resulting in the disabling of moral agency. Chapter three problematizes the assumed function of blame as agency-enhancing by developing examples where blame instead augments emotions like fear and shame, which diminish agency. Chapter four focuses on the case of catcalling in which the victim takes responsibility for the aggression, thus protecting and enabling the perpetrator. To conclude, I discuss the limitations of addressing affective injustice primarily through the lens of moral responsibility practices such as blaming and gesture to future directions that research on this topic could take by shifting the focus to feminist emotions.