Abstract:
Victims of oppression often are urged to uphold their self-respect, and in the context of oppression, self-respect takes on a particular salience. Undermining victims’ self-respect is a key mechanism of oppressive structures and practices, and self-respect therefore provides a basis for victims’ resistance. Even if all moral agents are subject to duties of self-respect, then, these duties take on a particular urgency for victims of oppression. For victims, however, these duties are also especially fraught. And urging victims to respect themselves can sustain a ‘politics of respectability’ or can easily devolve into victim-blaming—oppressive norms and practices, and can further undermine victims’ self-respect.
Most philosophical inquiry has focused on what self-respect is, whether there can be duties of self-respect, and what such duties call for under conditions of oppression. Short of concerns about ‘victim-blaming’, however, there has been little exploration of the accountability practices that duties of self-respect engender. In this paper, I explore the accountability practices that duties of self-respect engender: who should hold victims to account for their duties of self-respect, and how should they do so? Our everyday accountability practices suggest variability in who can hold an agent accountable: intimates and stakeholders, for example, are less easily brushed off than moralising strangers. This variability has been addressed in recent discussions about standing to blame. I provide an alternative account that focuses on accountability as a deliberative exercise: a mutual exchange of reasons and judgments that enhances interlocutors’ understanding of the duty in question, and what it requires in particular circumstances. Understanding accountability as deliberation helps to make sense of variability in terms of which individuals ought to hold someone to account: those individuals with epistemic insights into the individual, the duty, and the circumstances, and who can thereby enhance deliberation about what the agent ought to do.