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Virtues and Oppression: A Complicated Relationship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Marilyn Friedman
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Abstract

This paper raises some minor questions about Lisa Tessman's book, Burdened Virtues. Friedman's questions pertain, among other things, to the adequacy of a virtue ethical focus on character, the apparent implication of virtue ethics that oppressors suffer damaged characters and are not any better off than the oppressed, the importance of whether privileged persons may have earned their privileges, and the oppositional anger that movement feminists sometimes direct against each other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 23 , Issue 3: Special Issue: In Honor of Iris Marion Young: Theorist and Practitioner of Justice , September 2008 , pp. 189 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by Hypatia, Inc.

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References

Notes

1. Tessman suggests that this omission is a “problem of an action-centered approach” (23). My point is that it does not have to be so.

2. Privileged people sometimes face dangerous conditions voluntarily and for the excitement and challenge of it, for example, an icy ski slope. The fact that such conditions are faced voluntarily does not mean that facing them requires no courage. Also, privileged people are not immune from being confronted with dangerous conditions they do not choose to cope with but must still do so, for example, rape or a life-threatening illness.

3. I would also add that I don't think oppressed persons are less partial in their other-regarding virtues than privileged persons; both sorts of persons, I believe, tend to show virtuous concern selectively for the members of their own groups. Of course, the members of oppressed groups need selective concern more than do the members of privileged groups. But in the case of oppressed persons, selective concern may result in a tendency to care for the needs of one's own oppressed group only and to ignore other oppressed groups.

4. As I said earlier, I don't know of any virtue theorists who deny this.

5. I am grateful to Lisa Tessman for clarifying her position on these issues in private correspondence.

6. And the “one” in question would presumably also be one of those freeborn privileged men.

7. Tessman also discusses “traits whose status as virtues is murky in part because their value actually depends upon the presence of terrible conditions (95).” However, she has a different concern in mind here. If the virtue of sensitivity to the suffering of others is inherently painful, then the connection of this virtue to flourishing seems to be broken. Standard virtue theory has it that genuine virtue feels unqualifiedly good. Tessman has thus uncovered another puzzle in standard virtue theory.