Silenced, discredited, stripped of powers of moral appeal, and deprived of the interpersonal conditions necessary for maintaining self-respect, many people suffer from serious but subtle forms of oppression involving neither physical violence nor the use of law. In Civillized Oppression J.Harvey forcefully argues for the crucial role of morally distorted relationships in such oppression. While uncovering a set of underlying moral principles that account for the immorality of civilized oppression, Harvey's analyses provide frameworks for identifying morally problematic situations and relationships, criteria for evaluating them, and guidelines for appropriate responses. This book will be essential for both graduates and undergraduates in ethics, social theory, theory of justice, and feminist and race studies.

This book discusses how civilized oppression (the oppression that involves neither violence nor the law) can be overcome by re-examining our participation in it. Moral community, solidarity and education are offered as vibrant strategies to overcome the hurt and marginalization that stem from civilized oppression.

Explores the positive and negative relationship of civilization, taken in its broadest sense, to the oppression of the weak by the powerful. A set of distinctive essays offers fresh insights into the thought of political philosophers, including Locke, Montesquieu, Marx, Kant, Mill and Rawls, into the epistemology and psychology of subjection and into the postmodernist response of Foucault and his successors to the fact of the domination of human by human.

Explores the positive and negative relationship of civilization, taken in its broadest sense, to the oppression of the weak by the powerful. A set of distinctive essays offers fresh insights into the thought of political philosophers, including Locke, Montesquieu, Marx, Kant, Mill and Rawls, into the epistemology and psychology of subjection and into the postmodernist response of Foucault and his successors to the fact of the domination of human by human.

Oppression can take many different forms. The most uncontroversial cases of oppression are violent and legally sanctioned: Indigenous genocide during the colonization of the Americas, chattel slavery in the antebellum United States, secret detention and torture of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay, trans women housed in men's prison facilities despite widespread physical and sexual assault. We might distinguish between these cases and cases that involve neither physical violence nor the use of law. Consider being excluded from informal educational or networking opportunities, having one's testimony routinely discounted or dismissed, or incurring contempt or hostility for failing to live up to social norms. You might doubt that these latter examples have much in common with the cases involving violence and the law. I'll try to convince you otherwise. I argue that instances of "civilized" oppression share a characteristic practical predicament with the violent and legally sanctioned versions. Contemporary forms of oppression involve the dilemmatic structure of coercion without direct coercive threats. Both material and psychological factors--including threats of penalty, censure, and deprivation, as well as the necessity of keeping oppressive scripts in mind--structure the distinct unfreedom of oppression. I'd like to suggest that a recurrent and constitutive element of contemporary oppression is the option to avoid or mitigate sanctions in the short term by accommodating the unacceptable treatment of social group members. In addition to having few and objectionable options, oppressed agents must repeatedly choose between (1) imminent harm, and (2) avoiding or mitigating harm through complicity in injustice towards oneself and members of one's social group. I argue that individual resistance to oppression is a limited strategy. An individual can refuse to accommodate oppression by presenting herself for harm in response to a deliberative dilemma. This may be morally required in the face of mild social disapproval. It's implausible, however, that the oppressed are morally obligated to expose themselves to serious harm. Given an understanding of oppression as forcing a problematic presentation of options on individuals, resistance might aspire to adding another option. While oppressed individuals face real dilemmas, groups acting together are not constrained in the same way. Collective action eliminates or mitigates the sanctions of refusal to accommodate objectionable treatment. This sets up collective resistance as a form of resistance that avoids complicity and also refuses to accept punishment for noncompliance. In the rest of the dissertation, I consider how the proposal helps explain an otherwise underdeveloped aspect of epistemic injustice, how it interacts with the main insights of intersectionality, and how to understand the role of identity in oppression and resistance. I go on to to argue that the dilemmatic framework alone fails to capture the specificity of gender oppression in terms of gender identity and its corresponding liberatory possibilities. I consider how a queer and trans feminist understanding of gender and sexual identity helps to illuminate possibilities for collective resistance.

This anthology explores the many and varied connections between pacifism, politics, and feminism. Each topic is often thought about in academic isolation; however, when we consider how they intersect and interact, it opens up new areas for discussion and analysis.