MARA MARIN
BOOK MANUSCRIPT ABSTRACT
CONNECTED BY COMMITMENT
RETHINKING RELATIONS OF OPPRESSION AND OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO UNDERMINE THEM
Oppression is acknowledged as a deep and serious form of injustice. Yet, even as the responsibility to
address injustice has received increased attention from theorists of justice, there has been little discussion
of our responsibility to transform oppressive structures.
To advance this discussion we need to address two questions: the normative question of our obligations to
transform oppressive structures and the social theoretical question of how these structures endure and are
supported by individual, everyday action. In contrast to normative thinking which typically ignores the
social theoretical question, I believe that we can tackle the normative question only in light of a social
theoretical account. But even those normative approaches that do so by taking the view that our actions
perpetuate structures conceive of this fact as a barrier to the possibility of transformation. In contrast, I argue
that we should recognize its transformative potential: if our actions support structures, changing our actions
can weaken them.
However, we lack a proper understanding of the relation between individual actions and structures. This
lack is partly conceptual: we need a concept that would serve us simultaneously at the normative and social
theoretical levels. “Commitment” – a notion I elaborate in the first chapter – fills this gap. Commitments are
relationships of obligations agents create via their voluntary actions but without knowing in advance the
precise content of their obligations. The obligations thus arise as the accumulated effect, over time, of openended actions and responses to them. Two of its features recommend commitment as a model for
understanding our obligations under conditions of oppression: the voluntary yet not deliberate character of
its obligations and the role of cumulative action in creating them.
At the social theoretical level I argue that structures are sustained by constant action that conforms to them.
This means that our actions reinforce oppressive structures in virtue of their cumulative effect, regardless of
our intentions, and even in spite of our intentions to the contrary. This makes commitment better suited to
tackle the social-theoretical question. It also suggests, at the normative level, that we have an obligation to
dismantle oppressive structures because they are the results of our actions. As they are the cumulative effects
of our actions, our obligation to dismantle oppression takes the corresponding form of repeatedly acting
against norms that support it. This makes commitment better suited than its alternatives to tackle the
normative question as well.
Chapter One elaborates my notion of commitment and extends it from personal to structural relations.
Commitments are developed through actions that are voluntary yet, unlike contractual or consent-based
relationships, not under the agent's deliberative control. They implicate the agent in a relationship whose
precise details are not transparent at the outset of the relationship. When repeated over a significant period of
time, actions of this type incur obligations of a special kind, viz. obligations based on the voluntary character
of action, yet whose precise content is not known in advance to the agent. Commitments are relationships of
“open-ended” obligations.
Chapters Two through Four advance the argument of the book by examining three spheres of human life
that are particularly vulnerable to oppression: political relations, adult relationships of care, and work
relations.
Chapter Two, “Political Obligations of Commitment,” takes up a problem raised by the legal proposals that
Chapters Three and Four will advance. Such legal measures are meant to protect those vulnerable to
oppression, yet they also have to rely on the power of the state. For this reason, they create a tension between
the demand for justice and that of legitimate authority. While the former demand requires criticism and
suspicion of the authority, the latter requires its opposite: obedience to the demands of the authority and its
law even when we deeply disagree with them. I analyze this tension through a reading of Locke’s Second
Treatise. I argue that Locke’s use of trust as the basis of a legitimate government is marked by a similar
tension between the people’s right to rebel and their obligations under the law. Behind this tension, which is
fundamentally about the question of who should have final say on controversial claims of justice, there are
several assumptions about how the question of political obligation should be asked, assumptions that need to
be abandoned. In order to do so we need to modify the question of political obligation by making it about the
relationship we have to those governed by the same system of law. This relationship can be structured
equally – when the benefits of the law flow equally to all those governed by it – or hierarchically – when the
law’s benefits flow to some groups to the disadvantage of others. I show how laws depend on continuous
action conforming to them. Consequently, the structural relation between those governed by the same system
of law is best understood on the model of commitment.
Chapter Three, “Care, Oppression, and Marriage,” argues that caregiving creates a hierarchical relation
between caregivers and care receivers. This hierarchy, leading to oppressive constraints on the selfdevelopment of caregivers, is the result of the processes of interaction between a feature of the work of care –
its flexibility – and the norms, expectations and institutions that structure caregiving. Flexibility is the
attitude that helps caregivers respond to needs. Good caregiving requires flexibility because, first, needs have
to be assessed and their precise demands determined, secondly, they make demands at unpredictable
moments and, thirdly, needs change over time. In the process of developing and exercising “skills of
flexibility,” caregivers create obstacles to their self-development that make them vulnerable to oppression. A
reformed marriage law should provide protections against this vulnerability in the form of entitlements
against both the adult recipients of care and wider institutions. These entitlements would be best modeled on
the idea of commitment because their precise content would be unpredictable, given the flexibility of
caregiving.
Chapter Four, “Labor Relations and Obligations of Commitment,” argues that work as currently organized
in the formal economy produces a hierarchy between two groups, employers and employees. This hierarchy
is the result of two factors: features of the work activity and of the social organization of work. It turns into
oppressive constraints for employees, an injustice that calls for legal protections for labor unions in the form
of rights of collective bargaining, union shop and the right to strike. A full transformation of the hierarchical
relationship between employers and employees requires, in addition to the legal change, a change in workrelated politics. Laws can change the constraints and enabling conditions partly responsible for the
hierarchical relationship, but action within those constraints needs to be taken by agents for a full
transformation of the relationship. The notion of commitment enables us to see the possibilities for this action
in the structural relationship.
II. Contribution to the field
My book makes several contributions to discussions of oppression and of our responsibility to dismantle it.
Methodologically, it illustrates the virtues of an approach that tackles normative questions in light of social
theoretical accounts. Conceptually, it elaborates a novel notion – commitment – and introduces it to
discussions of oppression. Substantively, I approach oppression via spheres of social life that contribute to
gender and racial oppression rather than as a general phenomenon. At this third level, my book has
implications for controversies over citizenship, marriage law and the role of trade unions in improving the
quality of work and labor conditions. Moreover, my book shows that the difficulties encountered in these
controversies, difficulties typically discussed in isolation from each other, have a similar structure, and are
connected as aspects of a more general problem. Understanding commitment as a distinct category through
which to understand social relations allows us to better understand how these difficulties are related.