Vasanthakumar – January 2016
Epistemic privilege and victims’ duties to resist
their oppression
ASHWINI VASANTHAKUMAR
∗
‘It is impossible to characterise victims. They are just
people who were in the wrong place and the wrong time
in the wrong company. The unjust person has a character,
the victim does not even have a role.’
- Judith Shklar1
1.
Introduction
Victims 2 of oppression are prominent in struggles to defeat the
injustices they have endured. They write memoirs, mount legal
challenges, build social movements, engage in civil disobedience, and
instigate armed resistance. More prosaically, they speak up in the face
of casual prejudice, express sympathy with its targets, and intervene to
change subtle but damaging dynamics, say in the workplace or the
classroom. Victims speak up, and their doing so is instrumental to
defeating the injustices they have endured. These efforts are
burdensome, at times even dangerous, but they have been
instrumental in overcoming oppressive institutions and practices.
Historically, then, those who have suffered the worst forms of
Department of Politics, University of York. ashwini.vasanthakumar@york.ac.uk.
Distant relatives of this paper were presented to audiences at the New Voices in
Legal Theory Workshop (St Andrews), the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop
(Oxford), and the annual conference of the Association of Social and Legal
Philosophy (Leeds). I am grateful to them and to Bob Goodin, John William
Devine, Meira Levinson, David Miller, and Eric J Miller for written comments.
1 Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (Yale UP, 1990) at 35.
2 I use victims rather than survivors for two reasons. First, in many of the cases I
am considering, individuals continue to be the victims of injustice; this is especially
the case with structural injustice but also in cases like torture, where victims
continue to suffer long after they are directly subjected to wrongdoing. And second,
I take it that a primary motivation for the preference of the term survivor over
victim is that the latter implies passivity; the account I advance in this article
directly refutes that implication or connotation of the term victim.
∗
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
violence, humiliation and abuse are also those who have borne the
burdens of resisting injustice.
Victims’ resistance is not by accident, nor always by necessity; often it
is done out of a sense of duty. Victims of oppression often charge one
another with having duties: of solidarity, of pride, of mutual assistance,
and of political resistance. Many certainly see themselves as subject to
such duties. They engage one another, often in acrimonious debates,
over these duties and what actions they call for. And of course, many
victims reject the imputation of any such duty, charging that it
perversely burdens those who have already suffered wrongdoing,
engages in victim-blaming, or shows an unjustified solicitude for
fellow victims over others who are also in need of assistance.3 In short,
victims inhabit a complex normative universe that yields a rich and
sophisticated political discourse, that has resulted in a transformative
politics—and that largely has been ignored by normative theorists.
In this article, I argue that victims have a duty to assist fellow victims
and to resist the injustices they have experienced. I argue that in virtue
of their experience of an injustice, victims are epistemically privileged:
they have knowledge that injustice is occurring and knowledge of the
harms it inflicts. They are thus uniquely positioned to initiate and
motivate resistance efforts, and have a duty to do so. Victims’ duties to
resist are an extension of the duty to rescue—they arise precisely
because they were “in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong
company.”4 Victims’ duties of resistance consist primarily in speaking
up: in a duty to testify. Testimony is familiarly associated with injustice.
Here, I argue that testimony is a necessary tool to resist injustice and
rescue those who continue to be victimised. And victims are uniquely
positioned to provide such testimony. Ultimately, of course, those
who hear this testimony—its audience—may bear more demanding
duties to rescue because they are more capable and culpable. But
victims have an essential role to play, and a duty to do so.
3 See, e.g., Randall Kennedy, “My Race Problem,” The Atlantic, May 1997. Available
at
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/my-raceproblem/376849/ and Stephen L. Carter, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby
(New York, BasicBooks, 1991).
4 Shklar, The Faces, at 35. This echoes D. Jamieson’s description of the duty to
rescue as falling upon those who “are in the wrong place at the wrong time with the
right resources.” D. Jamieson, “Rights, Justice, and Duties to Provide Assistance: A
Critique of Regan’s Theory of Rights,” Ethics 100(2) (January 1990): 349-362 at 353.
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
Victims’ efforts may seem obvious, readily explained as a function of
collective interests and identities.5 Others have cast the duty to resist
as a duty to oneself—to protecting one’s rational capacities, selfrespect, or wellbeing.6 The account I develop here is compatible with
these arguments and reflects many of the insights they express. It is
distinct, however, in a few key respects. First, the duties I identify are
other-regarding: they are duties that victims owe to other victims who
remain subject to oppression. Victims ought to engage in resistance
because it assists other victims, and any benefit to their own wellbeing
or self-respect is incidental. Resisting injustice is not an exercise in
self-perfection,7 then, but an enterprise dedicated to the assistance of
others. Similarly, the duty is not directed towards realising justice
except insofar as this best assists victims. And finally, I therefore
conceive of resistance as an attempt to rescue or assist,8 and derive
victims’ duties from the duty to rescue rather than from any special
relationship between victims.9 Because victims’ duties are instrumental,
Tommie Shelby, “Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity of Common
Oppression,” Ethics (2002) explores identities and interests as bases for collective
anti-racism action. Interests and identities have, however, limited explanatory and
justificatory reach. Neither account can make sense of victims’ resistance when
their interests and identities are not at stake. And neither account captures the sense
in which these efforts are obligatory rather than merely contingent or
supererogatory. To survivors who no longer countenance injustice or who do not
share the bonds of community, by this account, no special reasons accrue; to
individuals who do not judge it to be in their self-interest to make common cause
with fellow survivors, or who do not identify with these survivors, reprimands,
expressions of disappointment, or accusations of betrayal are misplaced. For such a
powerful politics, to which many advances in the realization of justice are owed,
these normative bases are surprisingly flimsy.
6 See, e.g. Daniel Silvermint, “Resistance and Well-being,” Journal of Political Philosophy
(2013); Jean Harvey, “Victims, Resistance, and Civilized Oppression,” Journal of
Social Philosophy (2010); Bernard Boxhill, ‘Self-respect and Protest,” Philosophy &
Public Affairs (1976) and “The Responsibility of the Oppressed to Resist Their Own
Oppression,” Journal of Social Philosophy (2010); Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “Servility and
Self-Respect,” The Monist (1973) and “Moral Responsibility of Bystanders,” Journal
of Social Philosophy (2010) and Carol Hay, “The Obligation to Resist Oppression,”
Journal of Social Philosophy (2010). Ann Cudd is a notable exception here, arguing that
women’s acquiescence to sexist institutions strengthens these institutions and
harms other women. It is not clear, however, whether she attributes an obligation
to resist or treats such resistance as supererogatory. Ann Cudd, Analyzing Oppression
(OUP 2006).
7 Shklar, The Faces, at 31. While it is certainly true that victims who do not speak out
against injustice often are accused of lacking self-respect, self-respect cannot
account for the extent of victims’ efforts to resist injustice, particularly when their
self-respect or wellbeing is not obviously implicated.
8 I address the distinction between these two later.
9 Any such relationship, say of shared identity, is relevant to this account only
insofar as it makes victims more effective in providing a rescue.
5
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
they do not call for any particular attitude on the part of the victim;
victims need not care especially about resisting oppression or about
other victims.10 Victims may well be subject to duties of justice and to
special obligations deriving from particular relationships, identities and
commitments—I am interested here in making the case that they also
bear duties to rescue.
Attributing duties of resistance to victims and in virtue of their
victimhood might seem perverse. And yet, victims of oppression
regularly take it for granted that they bear duties of resistance: they feel
compelled to seek the defeat of the injustices they survived, to speak
out against those that continue to plague others, and they remonstrate
with fellow survivors who fail to join their efforts. Torture victims
provide testimony to human rights bodies about the abuse they have
endured, hoping that doing so will bring a halt to these practices.11
African-American professors point out ongoing forms of prejudice
within the academy even when doing so detracts from their career
advancement.12 And women share their daily experiences of sexual
violence and aggression, illustrating to others the prevalence and harm
of everyday sexism at the risk of inviting further aggression.13
2.
Preliminary Clarifications
a.
Injustice
I focus on institutional injustices, such as torture, police brutality,
systemic discrimination, and grave poverty. I therefore use injustice
10 Whether or not this is psychologically feasible, it is certainly morally desirable
that victims of oppression can resist their oppression without subjecting themselves
to the second-order oppression of having to construct their identity and personal
projects around this oppression. See Hay, “The Obligation,” at 29.
11 See, e.g. Azadeh Agah et al., We Lived to Tell: Political Prison Memoirs of Iranian Women
(McGilligan Books, 2007); Y. Sooka, “An Unfinished War: Torture and Sexual
Violence in Sri Lanka, 2009-2014”, (Bar Human Rights Committee of England and
Wales, 2014).
12 See, e.g. Walter R. Allen et al., “The Black Academic: Faculty Status Among
African Americans in U.S. Higher Education,” Journal of Negro Education 69(1/2)
(2000): 112-127; Ebony O. McGee and Lasana Kazembe, “Entertainers or
education researchers? The challenges associated with presenting while black,” Race,
Ethnicity and Education (2015).
13 See, e.g., Caitlin Dewey, “Rape threats, then no response: what it was like to be a
woman on Twitter in 2014,” Washington Post (December 17 2014) and Bethany Bell,
“Twitter abuse: Women journalists get more threats,” BBC News (February 6 2015).
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
and oppression interchangeably.14 Institutional injustice is a capacious
category, and ranges from what I will call persecution on the one hand,
to structural injustice on the other.
As a core case of persecution take torture and other grave
mistreatment of detainees. Typically, perpetrators are state agents or
quasi-state actors, acting with the direct endorsement or tacit
permission of the state, but acting clandestinely. Persecution has the
following features. First, it is clear that there is wrongdoing and that
some individuals are suffering an injustice—that an injustice is
occurring is common knowledge, at least between perpetrators and
victims.15 Second, there are easily identifiable perpetrators and victims,
even though there are other actors with more ambiguous standing (for
example, there might be officials who are non-intervening bystanders
or detainees who cooperate with officials in order to secure better
treatment.) And third, what would constitute a remedy—end the
torturing—is reasonably clear, even if the strategies most effective to
bringing this about remain less so.
Structural injustice, on the other hand, is inflicted unconsciously,
through the ordinary workings of seemingly just institutions, through
daily interactions and harmful stereotypes that, whilst publicly
disavowed nevertheless prevail.16 Consider the on-going oppression of
women and racial minorities. Gender oppression is perpetuated
through putatively benign institutions that arose against gendered
background assumptions, and whose operation continues to be
informed by sexist stereotypes, implicit bias, and social norms and
expectations. There are several manifestations, or potential
manifestations, of structural injustice against women, ranging from
perceptions of diminished competence in the workplace to being
frequently interrupted in meetings to the widespread prevalence of
sexual and intimate partner violence.
Structural injustice is therefore characterised by the following features.
First, there is a great deal of uncertainty as to whether and when a
particular event is in fact an instantiation of injustice and oppression;
14 All instances of oppression involve injustice, although all instances of injustice do
not necessarily involve oppression. Here, I follow Daniel Silvermint and others in
treating oppression as a condition brought about through the subjection to injustice.
15 Irrespective of creative lawyering that casts torture as enhanced interrogation—
for my purposes, torture stands exemplar as a case of a highly morally determinate
injustice.
16 I.M Young, “Five Faces of Oppression” in Lisa Heldke and Peg O’Connor (eds)
Oppression, Privilege, and Resistance (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004).
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
whether, for example, a woman is passed over for a promotion
because she is not competent for the job, or because she is unfairly
perceived as such. There is not, then, always clarity that wrongdoing is
occurring. Second, the distinction amongst perpetrators, bystanders,
and victims is tenuous. The perpetration of injustice is often
indeliberate and runs contrary to principles that are embraced by social
institutions, even as these collude to marginalise the poor, women, and
racial minorities. Individuals comply with rules and norms,
unconscious of their complicity in wrongdoing and unaware of the
harms they cause. This means that even victims may be complicit in
their oppression, even if unavoidably so.17 And third, it is therefore
not obvious what would constitute a remedy, much less how such a
remedy would best be secured. Thus, even though structural injustice
inflicts considerable violence,18 it does so less obviously, including to
victims. What distinguishes persecution from structural injustice, then,
is the means by which mistreatment is inflicted—and hence the agents
involved, the presence of intentional action, and the visibility of the
oppression. These features determine the moral determinacy of the
oppression which, as I will later argue, informs the nature of victims’
duties to rescue and resist.
Let me make three further points. First, these are two modes of
oppression rather than two different orders. Thus, persecution is not
necessarily more grave or vicious than structural injustice; its harms are
only more easily ascertained. Second, these two modes of oppression
are not binary opposites but are two ends of a spectrum. Oppression
therefore is a condition or state of being in the world;19 the spectrum
from persecution to structural injustice tracks the different agents and
institutions that produce this condition and with what degree of
intentionality and culpability. Importantly, it also tracks the degree of
moral determinacy, the relevance of which I elaborate upon in the
next Part. And third, these two modes are not mutually exclusive.
Persecution and structural injustice often reinforce one another and
victims are often subject to both modes of oppression. As a result,
particular injustices may be difficult to categorise since they are the
result of both: an individual is more vulnerable to persecution because
she is the victim of structural injustice, and this structural injustice
often is undergirded or expressed by persecution.20
Hay, “The Obligation,” at 25.
Jean Harvey, “Victims, Resistance, and Civilized Oppression.”
19 Silvermint, “Resistance,” at 205.
20 Violence against women and police brutality against racial minorities qualify as
persecution, but are also manifestations of structural injustice and are enabled by
prejudicial norms and stereotypes.
17
18
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
b.
Resistance
I have argued that victims’ epistemic privilege requires victims to alert
others—to speak out and provide testimony. Victims’ testimony takes
a number of formats: formal testimony before courts of law or other
inquiries; detailed interviews to researchers from international human
rights organisations and journalists; demonstrations and protests;
articles and memoirs; and speaking up in casual conversation. These
formats afford victims, variously, an opportunity for catharsis and
redemption, to hold perpetrators to account, and to provide a record
for future generations. I am primarily concerned with testimony’s
epistemic function: the ability for victims’ testimony to provide
second-hand knowledge to other bystanders, alerting them to the need
for a rescue and impressing upon them the importance of undertaking
such a rescue.
On this account, victims resist injustice because it is a means of
assisting other victims: their objective is to assist or rescue other
victims and resisting the practices and perpetrators who harm their
interests is one, arguably the most effective and enduring, way of
doing so. This means that in some cases, of course, open defiance and
resistance is not what is called for. In some cases, victims should
surreptitiously assist other victims, say by lending a sympathetic ear or
sharing coping strategies. Of course, even these forms of assistance
could be cast as acts of resistance; by providing succour to victims
they defeat perpetrators’ aims to dominate entirely their victims, or
they enable victims to bide their time until opportunities for effective
resistance arise.21 Even so, assisting victims and resisting the injustices
they suffer are analytically distinct—on this account, victims have duty
to do the latter only insofar as it is a means of securing the former.
The duty to rescue is not an extension of victims’ duties to justice.
3.
The Duty to Rescue
I argue that a victim’s duty to resist is an instantiation of her duty to
rescue. In the paradigm rescue case an agent happens upon a needy
Equally, of course, assistance to victims that does not target the institutions or
practices that cause their suffering could be accused of helping sustain those
institutions and practices.
21
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stranger who is drowning.22 If the agent is capable of rescuing the
drowning stranger without sacrificing morally comparable interests
then she has a duty to do so. If she cannot mount a rescue by
herself—suppose she cannot swim well and so will risk drowning—
then she has a duty to get help. And, if the coordinated effort of
multiple agents is necessary to mount a rescue, then they have duty to
so coordinate.23 Note the following. First, the needy stranger’s basic
interests are under imminent threat. The gravity of his need means
that, second, the capable agent bears the duty even though she is not
at fault for the needy stranger’s plight. Her blamelessness means,
however, that third, she is a capable agent only if she can attempt a
rescue without sacrificing morally comparable interests. And finally,
the duty to rescue is limited to securing the needy stranger’s basic
interests.24
This focus on basic interests has three important implications. It
means that the comparable costs that a capable agent can be expected
to incur are limited by her basic interests and wellbeing. A capable
agent would not therefore be expected to harm her basic interests or
wellbeing to rescue the needy stranger—for example, to sacrifice a
limb in order to save a life.25 I will elaborate on this later when I
consider objection of demandingness.
Second, it means that the weightiness of the duty depends on whether
basic interests are at stake: there is no distinction, in terms of their
grounds or weightiness, between the duty to rescue and the duty to aid,
for example, between the duty to rescue the drowning child one
encounters and the child starving on a distant continent.26 In both
cases basic interests are at stake. What distinguishes them is the moral
determinacy of the situation that confronts the capable stranger. Moral
determinacy obtains when the capable stranger is aware that there is a
needy stranger whose basic interests are under threat and is aware of
This paradigm case comes from Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,”
Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229-243.
23 Stephanie Collins, “Collectives’ Duties and Collectivising Duties,” Australasian
Journal of Philosophy (2013).
24 The duty to rescue can be grounded in duties of humanitarian aid, beneficence,
and justice. The duty to rescue I focus on is motivated by the basic interests and
well-being that are at stake for the needy stranger. They include life, bodily integrity
and self-respect—interests essential for the exercise of autonomy
25 J. Quong, “Killing in Self-defence,” Ethics 119 (2009): 507-537.
26 F. Kamm, “Does Distance Matter Morally to the Duty to Rescue?” Law and
Philosophy 19 (2000): 655-681.
22
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what specific actions she must undertake to resolve this threat.27 Moral
determinacy, therefore, is scalar: any given situation will be more or
less morally determinate. The paradigm rescue case is an exemplar of
moral determinacy; typically, the further one departs from the
paradigm case, the less morally determinate the scenario. If there was
another capable bystander, or various means of effectuating a rescue,
or uncertainty about how feasible a rescue would be, the situation
would be less morally determinate. And if there were multiple capable
bystanders, a complex of potential causes for the stranger’s plight, and
a number of ways of redressing this plight, the situation confronting
any capable bystander would be correspondingly less morally
determinate.
Thus, the duty to rescue arises whenever basic interests are at stake;
how morally determinate the situation is will inform how much
discretion the capable bystander has in determining how to bring about
a rescue. The weightiness of the duty does not change, only the clarity
of when it arises and how it should be discharged. This means that the
capable bystander’s discretion arises only from the epistemic
uncertainty that attends moral indeterminacy—epistemic uncertainty
as to whether she is confronted with an injustice and how she ought to
act—and not because it falls to the bystander’s discretion to determine
how weighty the duty to rescue will be and how easily it is
overwhelmed by her other reasons for action. 28
Finally, the impetus of protecting basic interests also points to how the
duty to rescue should be distributed. Often, there is more than one
capable bystander, with varying degrees of culpability or connection to
the needy stranger. There are therefore other candidates who might
bear the duty to rescue.29 The duty could fall upon those morally
responsible for the stranger’s plight, for example. Because they are
blameworthy, burdening these agents with the duty to rescue is
intuitively more appealing. Alternatively, the duty could fall to those
who stand in some special relationship to the stranger—perhaps her
V. Igneski, “Distance, Determinacy, and the Duty to Aid: a Reply to Kamm,”
Law and Philosophy 20 (2001): 605-616.
28 This aligns with Violetta Igneski’s account of the moral difference between
perfect duties to rescue and imperfect duties to assist the needy, but I argue that the
indeterminacy arises exclusively because of empirical uncertainty. Unlike Igneski, I
do not think that this uncertainty grants agents any leeway in determining how to
weigh up their moral reasons for action. Violetta Igneski, “Perfect and Imperfect
Duties to Aid,” Social Theory and Practice (2006).
29 David Miller, “Distributing Responsibilities,” Journal of Political Philosophy 9(4)
(2001): 453-471.
27
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family or friends—and who therefore have a special interest in her
welfare. 30 Neither of these agents, however, may be capable of
mounting a rescue; in the case of perpetrators deliberately imperilling
the stranger, they will be unwilling to do so. Meanwhile, the needy
stranger’s plight beckons. Because the duty to rescue is driven by the
stranger’s urgent need for rescue, it is therefore ahistorical and
exclusively forward-looking: it only inquires into who can rescue her
most efficaciously.31 Recall the duty to rescue is discharged once these
basic interests have been secured, so the needy stranger’s other
interests may secured by other agents acting on the basis of other
reasons.32
Given this impetus from basic interests, it might seem that structural
injustice cannot give rise to duties to rescue. Persecution involves an
imminent threat to victims’ vital interests, while structural injustice
involves ongoing subjection that diminishes victims’ life-chances and
undermines their self-respect. If persecution is exemplified by torture,
then structural injustice is exemplified by persistent stereotypes and
institutional myopia. At first glance, then, structural injustice seems to
threaten less vital interests and to do so without the same sense of
emergency. Women being interrupted in meetings might not seem to
threaten any basic interests. I want to resist this move. Structural
injustice engenders a great deal of violence, for example, through
police brutality, intimate partner violence, and the realities of
incarceration. Less visibly, basic interests are threatened through poor
health and malnutrition, or through low self-esteem and participation
in risky behaviour and harmful relationships. And indeed, diminished
self-respect and rational capacity is a basic interest. Death by a
thousand cuts is still death. The relevant distinction between
persecution and structural injustice is not whether basic interests are at
stake so much as how clear or obvious it is when these interests are at
stake and how they might be secured. Persecution and structural
injustice might both jeopardise basic interests, but the former is always
more morally determinate than the latter.
Miller refers to this as the ‘communitarian principle’ for distributing
responsibilities. “Distributing,” at 462-464.
31 Sometimes this may occasion an inquiry into the agents causally or morally
responsible for the stranger’s plight, but only because this is necessary for an
efficacious rescue.
32 At this point, other reasons for action might come into effect, such as the
communitarian principle. And this does not mean that those who are morally
blameworthy are let off the hook. They may be liable to compensate the rescuers or
be subject to punitive measures. See Miller, “Distributing,” at 466-468.
30
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To sum up, an individual is subject to a duty to rescue whenever a
stranger’s basic interests are at stake and when she is capable of
securing these interests most efficaciously and without sacrificing
comparable interests. The more morally determinate the situation is—
if it is clear that the individual’s actions are necessary for a rescue to
succeed and it is clear what these actions are—the more specific her
duty is; it is not more weighty but it is one for which she can more
easily be held to account. Capable bystanders may have other duties to
provide assistance, say when non-basic interests are at threat, that are
of different orders and weightiness, but whenever basic interests are at
stake, a duty to rescue arises.
4.
Victims’ Epistemic Privilege and the Duty to Testify
Why are victims, who have endured grave injustices, charged with the
duty to rescue those who continue to endure these injustices? Victims’
capabilities, I argue, arise from their very experience of injustice.
Because of this experience, victims are epistemically privileged: they
have firsthand knowledge of oppression and have special standing
when they share this knowledge. Victims are thereby uniquely
positioned to rescue other victims. As it will turn out, victims often are
unable to effect a rescue on their own since resisting oppression
typically requires the coordinated efforts of many actors. But in virtue
of their epistemic privilege they play a necessary, if circumscribed, role
in bringing about such efforts.
a.
Knowledge
Victims’ knowledge comes in two forms. First, victims have
information. Victims are aware that there is ongoing injustice and that
there exist victims urgently in need of rescue. Unjust practices are
often hidden from public sight, prevailing in the isolation of prisons,
in remote regions, or within marginalised communities. In many cases,
only perpetrators and victims are aware that grave injustices are
occurring, so absent a change of heart from perpetrators, it is only be
with the escape of some victims that any potential rescuers are created.
Beyond this, victims are also privy to certain details: about the nature
of the oppression faced, the mechanisms by which it is inflicted, the
personalities involved, and the gravity of the injuries suffered. Finally,
victims may have important perspectives of what counts as a rescue—
whether for victims, the defeat of oppression consists in reform or
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abolition, independence or autonomy—and they may also have a
better appreciation of what strategies will be most effective in bringing
about this rescue.
Second, victims have knowledge of injustice.33 As its victims, victims
have unique perspectives on particular injustices: they are on intimate
terms with oppression, and have a more nuanced and visceral
understanding of the harms meted out by particular injustices. Victims
can tell us what it felt like. In the case of grave injustices, these
perspectives might seem superfluous; surely we all know that torture
and sexual violence are wrong and inflict terrible harms on their
victims. Any such widespread awareness has arisen in large part,
however, from victims’ firsthand accounts. And indeed, these accounts
ensure that actions and practices are recognised as harmful for the
right reasons.34 Moreover, the harms inflicted by particular instances
of injustice are unique, given particular social and political contexts. It
is only through Primo Levi’s account that we have the image of the
drowned and the saved in Auschwitz.
And in other contexts, particularly structural injustice, the nature and
degree of the harms inflicted by unjust practices would not even be
recognised absent the testimony of victims. For example, when
women describe their experiences of being ignored in meetings and
the habits of self-censorship they develop as a result, they pierce the
cloak of normalcy surrounding feminine bashfulness. Victims of
injustice are in a position to be reliable providers of moral testimony:
through experience, they have practical knowledge—or are more likely
to have moral knowledge—than others, to better make certain moral
judgements, to better appreciate when some particular moral norm is
animated by a certain set of circumstances.35
In the terms of the paradigm rescue case, then, victims were drowning
strangers who have come ashore. They are aware that there are
drowning strangers in need of a rescue; of where these strangers are;
of what might count as a rescue; of how harrowing the struggle at sea
is; and therefore of the urgency with which this rescue should be
33 Margalit, Ethics at 168 distinguishes between political witnesses, who may be
better at uncovering the facts about evil, and moral witnesses, who “tell[] what it
was like to be subjected to such evil.”
34 For example, that sexual harassment is recognized as wrong because it infringes
on women’s sexual agency and physical integrity, rather than because it is an
“outrage against the modesty of a woman.” Indian Penal Code, Section 354.
35 See Paulina Sliwa, “In defense of moral testimony,” Philosophical Studies (2012) 158:
175-195, at 179-181.
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effected. There are others on the shore, of course, who may be better
swimmers, but they do not know where to look, or if they do see the
drowning strangers, do not realise they are drowning or appreciate the
gravity of their plight.
b.
Standing
Victims’ epistemic privilege arises not only from their firsthand
knowledge of injustice, but also from their standing as those who have
encountered oppression as its targets. Victims’ standing manifests
itself in three ways. First, they are more credible. Their experience of
oppression makes it more likely that they are appropriately motivated
when they alert others. In the main, this means that victims are usually
the only individuals with firsthand knowledge who are actually willing
to testify about injustice. It also means that when they do, they can
more easily be relied upon to provide a truthful account—unlike
perpetrators, they lack the incentive to gloss over uncomfortable
details, to sanitize their complicity in wrongdoing, or to minimize the
gravity of this wrongdoing.36
Second, victims of injustice have greater authority, especially when it
comes to articulating what justice might require, and identifying what
will count as an adequate remedy or restitution for their suffering.
Even well-meaning bystanders making a searching inquiry into this
question could not succeed without consulting the views of victims.
Victims constitute a class of individuals with particular and grave
interests at stake, and their views—on their experiences of injustice
and on what resistance might require—correspondingly have a
particular, and unique, weight. As I will later discuss, by no means
does this make victims’ perspectives dispositive on either the question
of the presence or remedy of injustice.
And finally, it is important that victims themselves assert these
interests. Oppressive institutions and norms often are predicated on
claims about victims’ lack of moral agency and worth. Insofar as
victims’ resistance is an expression and exercise of self-respect and
agency, it necessarily undermines oppression, and when this resistance
takes the form, at least initially, as testimony, it undermines oppressors’
denial of victims’ epistemic subjecthood.37
Equally, of course, they may be thought prone to exaggerate. I address this
concern, and identify potential remedies, in the next section.
37 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: power and ethics of knowing (Oxford UP, 2007).
36
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
c.
Limitations
This may seem to move too quickly. After all, victims’ knowledge and
standing are subject to a number of qualifications. Even in relatively
morally determinate circumstances characterised by clarity, victims’
knowledge about wrongdoing may be limited. Consider detainees
subject to torture and other abuse. Depending on the circumstances of
their detention, they often are isolated, unaware of the extent or nature
of the oppression they suffer, of the institutional hierarchy
undergirding this oppression, or of the individual identities of
perpetrators or other victims. Given their treatment, they may
frequently be disoriented, unconscious, or unable to remember
particular incidents or individuals.
These limitations arise even more acutely with respect to structural
injustice. Structural injustice is invisible, and seemingly incidental: it is
inflicted through the normal workings of complex institutions and
rules that are seemingly fair and transparent. When individuals lose
through these institutions, this loss is easily regarded as a matter of
individual failure or bad luck rather than as an injustice. This is true for
victims as well. Recognising the fact of structural injustice often
requires more than the experience of it—it requires a broader
understanding of historical trends and causal patterns that connect
together seemingly isolated individual occurrences to reveal both the
existence and extent of structural injustice.
Victims’ experience of oppression, then, does not always suffice for
epistemic competence; much less, it might seem, for epistemic privilege.
After all, other actors might be privy to better information. In the case
of torture, for example, perpetrators would seem to have better
information about the practice, prevalence and persons involved in the
perpetration of abuse. And in the case of structural injustice, although
victims can acquire information about the fact and prevalence of
structural injustice, there is good reason to think they are less likely to
do so, given their often diminished access to education and facility
with certain types of explanatory or evidentiary tools.38
Of course, this disadvantage should not be overstated because victims
still have experiential knowledge of injustice. Perpetrators are often
unable to recognize their conduct as oppressive. And even if victims
See Alison Wylie, “Why Standpoint Matters,” Science and Other Matters: Issues in
Philosophies of Science and Technology (2003); Carol Hay, “The Obligation to Resist
Oppression” at 28.
38
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
have imperfect information, they alone have access to knowledge of
what victimhood feels like.39 But even here, victims may fall short. If
victims have internalised oppressive norms, they will not feel
humiliation, outrage or indignation when injustice touches their
lives—or will not recognise their feelings as such. A woman who treats
as natural the casual condescension of her male colleagues would be
ill-placed to articulate to others the ways in which such condescension
feels and the harms it inflicts. Eager to avoid the trope of the ‘angry
Black man,’ a victim of racial injustice might refuse to acknowledge,
much less express, the rage he feels. The converse is also true. Victims
may be prone to indulge in a sense of victimhood, quick to point to
injustice as the source of their misfortune, failures, or feelings of
discomfort, and prone to exaggerate the harms they experience.
Particularly in the case of structural injustice, this suggests that the two
forms of knowledge are intertwined and interdependent. Without
knowledge that oppression exists, victims cannot recognise or make
sense of their own experience of injustice as injustice—they will lack any
experiential knowledge of the harms injustice inflicts. And a robust
understanding of the nature and prevalence of oppression guards
against an extravagant sense of the harms it inflicts. At the same time,
an inquiry into the existence and extent of structural injustice often is
instigated by testimony of individual harms: a victim articulates the
grinding humiliations of seemingly minor occurrences—routine police
stops, scepticism from officials, wariness from strangers—the gravity
of which prompts attention and investigation.
39 To a limited extent, others can gain access to the experience of injustice. For
example, in 2008 Christopher Hitchens underwent waterboarding, then recognized
by the US government as a lawful interrogation technique, to provide “firsthand
knowledge” that it was in fact torture. C. Hitchens, “Believe me, it’s torture,”
Vanity Fair July 31, 2008.
Available at: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/08/hitchens200808. Hitchens
details the experience of being drowned and the subsequent claustrophobia and
sense of smothering he feels whenever he is short of breath. Hitchens’ experience
of waterboarding was voluntarily undertaken, was done with the knowledge that it
would be terminated as soon as he signaled, and was done without verbal insults
and other humiliations—the means by which he gains access to the experience of
waterboarding necessarily precludes the sense of domination and despair that
characterize torture and arbitrary detention. Acquired experience is less availing in
the case of structural injustice where there are few discrete experiences that can be
replicated. It is not impossible, of course, but its probative value is more limited. See,
e.g., J.H. Griffin, Black Like Me (1961), a memoir of a white Texan man who
transformed his appearance to pass as Black and who reported on his experiences
in the South.
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
Because victims’ standing follows, in large part, from their knowledge,
limitations in their knowledge—and certainly perceptions of these
limitations—infect the strength of their standing. Irrespective of their
truthfulness, victims are not always regarded by others as the most
credible witnesses; they are easily dismissed as oversensitive, suspected
for exaggerating the harms they have suffered, or otherwise treated as
“unreliable witnesses to their own lives.”40 In fact, this incredulity is an
important tool of oppression. 41 Whatever the limitations of their
knowledge and standing, however, victims are essential to resistance
efforts. Imagine a resistance movement that involves no victims.
There would be reason to question whether there are indeed victims
of injustice in need of rescue; whether these rescue efforts accurately
and effectively target the injustices suffered; and whether they bring
about a state of justice, or at least, greater justice that victims would
recognise as such. And the absence of victims would replicate the very
marginalisation these resistance efforts seek to redress, imperiously
acting for victims who are treated as passive agents. Resistance efforts
that involve no victims are suspect enterprises.
d.
Testimonial virtue
Victims are not always the most competent or the most credible
testifiers. And in fact, the aims of accuracy and credibility are often in
tension with one another: confronted by accounts of brutality or
violence they knew nothing about, bystanders may be incredulous,
suspecting that victims are exaggerating or are overly sensitive.
Attempting to appear credible, however, might compel victims to
satisfy standards of reasonableness that are stacked against them, or to
speak in a register which prevents them from speaking truthfully about
their experiences.42 I will briefly outline two aspects of the role of
witness—the development of testimonial virtues, in community with
others—that potentially help navigate this tension.
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things To Me (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), at 8.
Fricker, Epistemic Injustice.
42 The campaign against sexual harassment had to re-describe centuries-old
practices in terms of sex discrimination, and this recharacterisation conflicted with
prevalent notions of common sense and reasonableness. See, e.g. Reva B. Siegel,
“Introduction: a Short History of Sexual Harassment Law,” in Directions in Sexual
Harassment Law (ed. Catherine A. Mackinnon and Reva B. Siegel) (Yale UP, 2003).
In recent campus protests in the United States, for example, student protestors
have talked about their pain in ways that have been accused of as disruptive and
lacking in civility. See, e.g. Zareena Grewal, “Here’s what my Yale students get: free
speech and anti-racism aren’t mutually exclusive,” Washington Post (November 12,
2015).
40
41
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
Testimony occasions a number of virtues: the epistemological virtues
of conscientiousness, open-mindedness, perception, and intuition; the
testifier’s virtues of honesty, transparency, and courage; and the
audience’s virtues of trust, critical reflectiveness, and self-monitoring.
Because victims testify in aid of others, they are motivated, or ought to
be, to be both accurate and credible, and these virtues guard against
tendencies of denial, exaggeration, or self-indulgence. These virtues
are more easily developed when testimony is seen as a collective
enterprise. When victims speak to one another about the injustices
they experience, they have a less hostile environment in which to
articulate their experiences and gain confidence in their perspectives.
These deliberations also allow victims to check against self-deception,
and to acquire information that adds nuance to their own
understanding of events. Feminist consciousness-raising groups in the
1960s, for example, provided spaces in which women could articulate,
however inchoately, their frustrations; were able to situate these
frustrations into an emerging framework of gender justice; and were
able to consult one another for sympathy, support, and solutions. This
is true even in cases of persecution, where victims share information,
discover patterns, and identify key figures. Speaking to one another
bolsters victims’ confidence in their understanding of their own
experience; the need to communicate this understanding to others
requires them to temper their assertions, to connect their sense of
injustice with evidence of injustice, to give reasons and explanations and
illustrations.43
By no means does the collective nature of testimony make it especially
cohesive. Victims disagree about the facts of the matter. In some cases,
they will disagree over whether or not oppression is in fact present,
over whether a given event or phenomenon is in fact a manifestation
of injustice. Victims may offer competing interpretations of the same
events, dispute the characterisation of other victims, or the
romanticisation of suffering. 44 Victims also disagree over what counts
This is important to ensure that victims do not end up in ‘echo chambers,’
speaking only to those who share their perspectives and becoming more strident in
these. For example, those who bemoan the ‘war against Christmas’ in the United
States. Having to persuade others not only protects against these forms of selfdeception but ensures that victims are more credible and enjoy better standing. If,
by contrast, the duty to resist is an extension of the duty of self-respect, these
considerations fall at the wayside. It would be imperative that the victim speak
truthfully of her experience without worrying about credibility or persuading others.
44 For example, Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts an incident in which a white woman
pushes his dawdling young son, narrating both his response and situating it within a
43
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
as resistance, both in terms of what strategies will be most effective
and what goals to prioritise. Some victims may seek to change
attitudes and practices through grassroots engagement whilst others
aim at legislative amendments; some may seek criminal trials for
perpetrators whilst others focus on reconciliation.45 Testimony thus
engenders deliberation, accountability, and critical reflection. And the
earnest dissensus it produces reveals, at the very least, some consensus
over the existence of oppression and its gravity, and bolsters the
credibility of their claims that there are victims in need of rescue.
However circumscribed, then, the role of testifying is demanding and,
as any cursory survey of popular discussions on race and gender
suggest, fraught. But rescuing the oppressed often requires more: it is
a long-term enterprise that typically involves defeating practices
deliberately instituted by powerful state actors. It will call for a
combination of strategies, including indirectly applying pressure to
perpetrators through international organisations, governments and
civil society organisations as well as directly resisting perpetrators
through armed opposition. It requires coordination amongst multiple
actors who may have different interests or agendas and the exercise of
political judgement to gauge changing political events and
opportunities. In short, resisting injustice is far more complex than the
paradigm rescue case, and may require more than testifying once.
5.
Two Objections
framework of historical and ongoing violence against black bodies. Ta-Nehisi
Coates, Between the World and Me (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2015)
at 93-96. In his review of Coates’ work, Thomas Chatterton Williams disputes
Coates’ characterization of the event, deems his reaction disproportionate, and
argues that treating blacks with ‘infantilising care’ precludes their equal freedom. See
Thomas Chatterton Williams, “Loaded Dice,” London Review of Books December 3,
2015 Vol 37(23): 15-18.
45 Thus, if victims of structural injustice appear inactive, this may reflect only a
different strategy of resistance rather than a shirking of their duties. Some include
‘internal resistance’—a rejection of oppressive norms and an awareness of their
operation without more—as resistance, and some times the only form of resistance
that is available to victims. See Boxhill, The Responsibility,” at 10. Hay distinguishes
this from acquiescence, acting in bad faith, or ignorance, none of which constitutes
resistance. Hay, “Obligation” at 33-34. On my account, ‘internal resistance’ counts
as such only insofar as it diminishes the oppression of others, which it may do so
indirectly.
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
This invites two objections (at least). First, is the duty to testify—even
once—too demanding? Can we, for example, require victims of
torture to share their traumatic experiences in order to rescue others
left behind, or should we treat any such effort as supererogatory?
Second, does testifying exhaust victims’ duty to rescue? After all, the
basis of victims’ special capabilities, and hence their special duties,
arises from their epistemic privilege. Once they publicise their
knowledge, they would seem to lose this privilege—do victims
become just one of many bystanders with no further duty to monitor,
advise or urge on? Let me address these objections in turn.
a.
Demandingness
The capabilities account burdens blameless strangers for being in the
“wrong place at the wrong time with the right resources.”46 Victims
are doubly burdened as the victims of injustice and the agents charged
with its defeat. And defeating injustice is always more onerous and
complex than the paradigm rescue case. Attributing any duties of
rescue to victims might seem too demanding. I will argue, however,
that demandingness will not act as a limitation on victims’ duties to
testify and resist injustice.
Under the capabilities account, a victim has a duty to assist only if she
can do so without sacrificing ‘morally comparable’ interests. The duty
is more or less demanding depending on which of the victim’s
interests are counted and with what weight.47 In the paradigm rescue
case, for example, a bystander would not have a duty to rescue a
drowning stranger if she cannot swim, if she can swim but the
conditions are such that she is at real risk of drowning, or if she could
save the drowning stranger but only by sacrificing a limb. If, however,
rescuing the stranger would require the bystander to ruin expensive
shoes, let a friend down, or miss a job interview, the bystander would
have a duty to rescue. Where the line is drawn is a function of the
interests at stake for the bystander and the degree to which her efforts
are both necessary and sufficient to rescuing the needy stranger—that
is, the degree of moral determinacy. Thus, even a frivolous sacrifice
would not be called for if futility was a certainty.
D. Jamieson, “Rights, Justice,” at 353.
A less demanding iteration of the duty to rescue would allow an ‘agent-centred
prerogative’, whereby the capable bystander is permitted to grant her own interests
and personal projects greater weight than those of the needy stranger. Thus, she
might be relieved of the duty even if morally comparable interests are not at stake.
See Samuel Scheffler, Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford University Press, 1994).
46
47
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
Take the victim of torture who flees her persecutors and finds refuge
elsewhere. Would it be too demanding to require her to tell others
about her experiences? First, let’s consider whether testifying calls on
the victim to sacrifice ‘morally comparable’ interests. It might be
argued that providing testimony, particularly of traumatic experiences,
is psychologically infeasible. Victims may be too traumatised to revisit
their experiences, may be unable to make sense of their experiences,
and may be unable to articulate these to others. For such victims their
experience of injustice is debilitating rather than enabling. Such victims,
however, would not count as capable bystanders; they are not
candidates for bearing a duty to rescue.
Even if a victim is capable of testifying, however, it might seem that
the costs of doing so are too great. This is certainly true when a victim
imperils her basic interests by testifying. For example, torture victims
who remain within the reach of their torturers do not have a duty to
speak up if doing so leaves them open to retribution. Morally
comparable interests are clearly at stake. Testifying may also be
psychologically traumatic. Some might argue that revisiting humiliating
and traumatic experiences and publicising these to strangers is not
merely costly; it is asking victims to harm themselves in order to help
others.48 And once they testify, victims confront further costs. They
may be met with incredulity, ridiculed in the media, or have their
personal lives scrutinised by skeptics. There is no question that
testifying, even once, is demanding; a cursory reading of torture
survivors’ accounts makes clear the difficulties they face in recounting
painful and humiliating episodes. This does not mean that the
requirement to testify is overly demanding, however, especially when it
is weighted against the basic interests at stake for those who remain
subject to torture and other abuses. Morality is demanding, but its
demandingness does not tell against its being true.49
This analysis changes as the degree of moral determinacy diminishes.
Consider cases of structural injustice. As I have argued, structural
injustice can undermine the basic interests of its victims, including
bodily integrity and self-respect. What is unclear, however, is when a
particular incident or event is a manifestation of structural injustice,
whether and how closely it undermines the basic interests, of which
victims, and what actions will provide a remedy. Similar indeterminacy
applies to the risks the victim undertakes by testifying or speaking up,
48
49
I am grateful to Diletta Laura for pushing me on this point.
Robert E. Goodin, “Demandingness as a Virtue,” Journal of Ethics (2009).
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
for they themselves remain subject to the systemic injustice. For
example, structural oppression of women does violence to their basic
interests in bodily integrity and self-respect, but it also manifests itself
in casual sexism and implicit bias. A woman may notice that she and
her female colleagues are frequently interrupted in a work meeting. It
may be unclear to her, however, whether this is an instance of
structural oppression (perhaps she is surrounded by over-enthusiastic
colleagues who interrupt men and women equally); what interests, if
any, it implicates; how she might act to secure any interests that are in
jeopardy; and whether she can intervene without risking retaliation or
ridicule herself. That is, it will be unclear whether basic interests are at
stake, whether she sacrifices morally comparable interests to those at
stake, and whether her doing so will in fact make a difference.
Note that the demands of testimony for cases of structural injustice
are often more insidious, and potentially more burdensome, than
those in the case of persecution. With torture, the moral requirement
is that victims of torture must revisit and recount deeply traumatic
events. Structural injustice, on the other hand, seems to require victims
to be eternally vigilant—to read situations for ways in which they may
be instantiations of structural injustice, to deliberate over whether or
not they ought to speak up, and to address themselves constantly to
the structural injustices they encounter. This leads easily into what Hay
has described as a ‘second-order’ oppression: not only do oppressive
institutions constrain and burden victims’ life choices, but resisting
these institutions similarly overdetermine individuals’ identities and life
choices. Moreover, the immediate costs of speaking up are not always
obvious, and in some cases the threat of violence is ever-present: mild
remonstrations with the police may invite excessive force; a 140character tweet prompts graphic threats of violence.
As a result of this uncertainty, the victim’s duties are less clear-cut: she
has greater discretion in judging the situation, gauging the different
interests at stake, and deciding on a course of action. In this regard,
her duties are akin to imperfect duties.50 Absent such indeterminacy
50 Although here, her discretion comes about only because of epistemic uncertainty
rather than because she has discretion to weight interests differently. A torture
survivor might similarly have such discretion. Suppose there is already a
considerable body of testimony from other victims and witnesses, so that the
additional gains from her testimony are likely to be marginal, or conversely, that
hers is the only testimony and is unlikely to have any impact; in such cases, because
the situation confronting the survivor is less morally determinate, there is greater
room for divergent judgments about how she ought to act. Again, to emphasise,
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Vasanthakumar – January 2016
and when basic interests of victims are in jeopardy, victims often will
be morally required to inform others of the need for rescue. Of course,
this does not mean that they invite condemnation if they remain silent.
We might be sympathetic when the victims of torture refuse to speak
to others about their experience and humbled when they choose to do
so, but these reactive attitudes only recognise how demanding the
moral requirement is; not that it is not in force.51
b.
Noncompliance
Perhaps a more fatal challenge to victims’ duties arises from concerns
about fairness. Victims’ duties arise because others have failed to
comply with the requirements of morality. This non-compliance
potentially arises at two points: when perpetrators commit injustices
against victims, and when capable bystanders, including other victims,
fail to do their part after they have been alerted.
The noncompliance of others often is thought to diminish an
individual’s duties. It is perpetrators’ noncompliance, however, that
occasions victims’ duties. Recall that the primary appeal of the
capabilities account is its forward-looking focus on providing a remedy
for the needy without considering questions of blameworthiness—of
the capable agent, the drowning stranger, or of any perpetrators. That
is, bystanders have a duty to rescue even when they are blameless and
when blameworthy agents are present.52 Of course, the presence of
perpetrators matters: it potentially increases the costs of rescue, it may
determine how such a rescue is best carried out, and perpetrators may
be liable for recompense after a rescue has been executed. But the
non-compliance of perpetrators does not preclude a duty to rescue.
Indeed, non-compliance is not relevant in and of itself, but matters
only in terms of how costly it makes the duty to rescue.
This is also true at the second point of non-compliance victims may
confront once they have alerted others. Most rescue efforts require
coordination amongst multiple actors: multiple victims to more
effectively alert other bystanders of the need for a rescue, and these
other bystanders to act to bring about a rescue. If all similarly situated
these are divergent judgments about how effective her actions are likely to be and not
about how to balance or weight ‘morally comparable’ interests.
51 This also means that testifying is not supererogatory—it is not merely morally
desirable but required.
52 David Miller “Distributing,” at 460 (although Miller considers only when
blameworthy agents are incapable of providing a remedy.)
22
Vasanthakumar – January 2016
victims testify, and all capable bystanders pay attention and act, then it
may well turn out that victims’ duties are easily discharged and
concerns about their demandingness are misguided. What, however, if
other victims refuse to testify? Or, if multiple victims testify to a world
that pays no attention? Must victims keep speaking, trying to motivate
or pressure others to do their part?
Broadly, there are three answers to the question of how far
conscientious agents must take up the slack: individuals do more than
their fair share, they do only their fair share, or they do less.53 The
rationale behind these three can be illustrated if we return to the
paradigm rescue case. Imagine there are four drowning strangers and
four equally capable bystanders, such that a fair allocation requires
each bystander to rescue one drowning stranger. If one of the
bystanders walks away without attempting a rescue, the remaining
three—the conscientious bystanders—could not rescue their allocated
strangers and then walk away. Indeed, if three walked away leaving
behind only one bystander, and this sole bystander could rescue all
four strangers at no excessive cost to herself, then she is required to
do so. The need is so great and can be met at such relatively low cost
that the lone rescuer is required to do more than her fair share.
Imagine now that there are hundreds of drowning strangers and tens
of capable bystanders. The bystanders can save the strangers only by
creating and sustaining appropriate institutions, the success of which
depends on broad-based participation. If a sufficient number of
bystanders are unwilling to participate, the conscientious bystanders
cannot make it up, since success depends on the number of
participants rather than the extent of their efforts. In this case, perhaps
conscientious bystanders are required only to do their fair share to
maintain these institutions. In the face of non-compliance, victims’
responsibilities remain the same because additional efforts would make
no difference to the outcome.
And third, some answer that individuals should do less than their fair
share if a rescue is rendered futile by others’ non-compliance. If a
victim was reasonably certain that no compliance from other potential
rescuers was forthcoming, and that without such compliance her
efforts would be futile, then she arguably is required to do less than
her fair share would be under conditions of perfect compliance. This
David Miller, “Taking up the Slack? Responsibility and justice in situations of
partial compliance” in Carl Knight and Zofia Stemplowska (eds) Responsibility and
Distributive Justice (Oxford, 2011).
53
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scenario, however, is one where the duty to rescue would not even
arise: the victim is effectively on her own, unable to provide a rescue
by herself.
There are of course further variations within these scenarios, with
correspondingly different outcomes. Some have thus urged—and I am
inclined to agree—that there is no single answer, and individual’s
duties should be considered on a case-by-case basis.54 Three general
points, however, can be made about non-compliance in the context of
victims’ duties. First, and most important, the non-compliance of
others is itself irrelevant to the question of what duties victims
ultimately bear. Instead, their duties are determined by the cost and
effectiveness of their additional efforts by their ability to rescue at no
excessive cost to themselves. Thus, although the non-compliance of
others indirectly informs the victim’s duties, it does not by itself limit
them. The single answer, then, is that when individuals can secure the
basic interests of others without sacrificing morally comparable
interests, they have a duty to do so—whether this duty arises and what
it requires, given the non-compliance of others, will be decided on a
case-by-case basis.
Second, how the non-compliance of others informs victims’ duties
cannot be determined ex ante. Given the complexity, coordination,
long-term strategising and happenstance that characterise resistance
efforts, it is impossible to determine at the outset which strategy to
pursue amongst the many available, the minimum number of
compliant bystanders required before a rescue is futile, and the types
of actions these bystanders ought to take. Victims cannot know what
rescue scenario they confront because this is still indeterminate; they
can only make assessments of how burdensome their responsibilities
are proving to be. This means that they should persist in their efforts
to provide a rescue up to and until the costs will, with reasonable
certainty, outweigh any benefits to be gained. A victim could not,
confronted by the enormity of the injustices to be remedied and an
apparent lack of interest from others, decide that any effort would be
futile and walk away.
And finally, the forward-looking focus of the capabilities account does
not mean that wrongdoers are let off the hook. Perpetrators,
beneficiaries and bystanders of injustice have important roles to play
in the account I’ve developed here. Ending unjust practices often
Laura Valentini, “Ideal vs. Nonideal Theory: a Conceptual Map,” Philosophy
Compass (2012) at 655.
54
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requires the cooperation of perpetrators, and this cooperation is often
garnered through the pressure imposed by bystanders and victims. In
addition, perpetrators may be liable to both victims and rescuers for
recompense of some sort, and they may be subject to punishment;
accountability of this sort is often integral to ending unjust institutions
and practices. Questions about fairness are relevant, then, but
postponed.
Given that victims have already endured grave injustices, a duty to
resist may seem to be a heavy burden that is unfairly borne. This does
not mean that there is no duty. Individuals who are uniquely
positioned to rescue others have a duty to do so, irrespective of how
they came to be in this position. Victims of injustice often are in this
position. They are not the sole rescuers or even the rescuers with the
most substantive role. Indeed, the opposite often is true. However, to
the extent that victims’ testimony is essential for such a rescue to even
occur, and so long as alerting others does not require them to sacrifice
morally comparable interests, victims have a duty to do so.
6.
Conclusion
Victims resist injustice because it is in their interests to do so and
because it is required by their self-respect. Their resistance is also
demanded by a duty to assist fellow victims. I have provided an
account of victims’ duties to resist within the framework of a duty to
rescue, arguing that their firsthand experience of injustice uniquely
positions them to initiate resistance. Their duty consists primarily in
testifying about their, and others’, suffering, alerting others to the fact
of injustice and the need for rescue.
This account is distinct in several key respects to its alternatives. First,
it better coheres with victims’ moral discourse and political practice.
By casting victims’ duties as other-regarding, it makes sense of victims’
beliefs that these duties are owed to others, and renders coherent
moral practices like expressing disappointment and betrayal when
fellow victims appear not to be doing their part. The focus on
speaking up identifies the importance of developing testimonial virtues
and the importance of doing so with others, again making normative
sense of on-going debates amongst victims and others about how to
fulfil the requirements of truthfulness and credibility. And this account
carves out a role for victims that is connected to those of bystanders
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and perpetrators, again, a more accurate reflection of actual resistance
efforts.
Second, it provides a more systematic way to think through the limits
of victims’ duties. Other accounts merely stipulate that the duty is
demanding and should therefore be regarded as imperfect, leaving it to
the discretion of victims how weighty this duty will be and what its
performance will call for. Or they make the very existence of the duty
discretionary, contingent on victims’ voluntary acceptance of
responsibilities to resist. The instant account identifies moral
determinacy as a key factor that spells out when a victim should act
and how much discretion she has to determine how she will act, but
overall provides a more robust and demanding ground for victims’
duties.
And finally, this account gestures towards institutional responses. If
victims play an essential role in identifying and remedying injustices,
like whistleblowers and civil disobedients,55 then there ought to be
institutional protections that enable their performance of this role, that
create these roles, or that at the very least lessen the burdens they face.
More broadly, by foregrounding victims’ epistemic privilege, this
account recognises victims of injustice as moral agents with unique
perspectives on injustice that are essential for both theorising and
realising justice. It takes cognisance of the essential role that victims
have played in realising justice, and the normative reasons that
motivate and require this role. And by theorising from injustice, it treats
injustice not merely as a “surprising abnormality”56 but instead as a
reality rich in normative reasons, moral perspectives and political
action.
See, e.g. David Lefkowitz, “On a Moral Right to Civil Disobedience,” Ethics 117
(2) (January 2007): 202-233.
56Shklar, The Faces, at 17.
55
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