 Hello, I'm JJ Joaquin and welcome to philosophy and what matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view My co-host for today is my dear friend. He's old Diana and our topic is social construction and social critique We have different ways of categorizing things. We categorize non-living things in terms of their type Or in terms of their shape size and color and so on on the other hand We categorize living things in terms of their biological families We have general categories for microbes, plants, insects and animals and we have specific species under these categories as well Now some philosophers think that these categories are natural and objective features of reality But what of us? How should we categorize ourselves? Of course, we belong to the biological category of homo sapiens But we also have a gender. We belong to a certain class and race Now some philosophers have labeled these as socially constructed categories But what kind of thing is a social category and why does thinking about these things matter? To guide us to this conundrum, we have Sally Hess-Langer, Ford professor of philosophy and women's studies Women's and gender studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So hello professor Hess-Langer. Welcome to philosophy and what matters? Thank you so much. It's lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me Okay, so you have worked on many areas in philosophy From abstract topics like the metaphysics of persistence to more concrete ones like philosophy of adoption, race and gender But how did you get into philosophy in the first place? So when I was a High school student, I took a history class in which we read Plato And I thought that reading Plato was history and I didn't realize it was philosophy So I loved it. It was my favorite thing in all of high school And then I go to college university and I and I didn't know that I would be I would enjoy philosophy classes Because I tried history because I thought that's where you got to read things like Plato and what happened was I Started becoming interested in religious studies and I've a form that was very much drawing on Continental philosophy and some important continental philosophers thinking about Language and and how language shapes our understanding of the world, etc And I was interested in the question. What is the relationship between religious experience and aesthetic experience? and So I went off to India for a while and I studied Bharatanathian which is a dance in southern India that had been a temple ritual But became a secular art form and I was interested in trying to bring that back to my writing a thesis of masters of undergraduate thesis and When I came back the professor I'd been working with and who encouraged this had not gotten ten And the person who replaced him was not enthusiastic And so someone said well, you know, you've done all your your religious studies requirements Maybe you should go take some philosophy and you can have a joint major in philosophy and religion I said really philosophy and I went over to philosophy and I took a Course from George Bieler and metaphysics and I found my home. It was just like yes This is where I belong. This is where I should have been all along. And so then George and David Reeve who was also there at the time he does ancient philosophy They encouraged me to go to graduate school and so I did Okay, so that's interesting because he started out as In religious studies. So what got you into religious studies in the first place? Well, I'm not sure. I think part of it was I had like oftentimes in college You have a friend who's taken a class and thought it was a great class and then Recommends it and then you take it or something like that. Um, I think that I was a very, you know abstract thinker. I Was very interested in Experience and the meaning of things but another way of thinking about it was that I grew up a Christian scientist, which is a very marginal religion that that has a quite Unusual metaphysics and their metaphysics is that There's no material world So they're kind of Berkeley and idealists. There's a way in which they're Berkeley and idealists and I Fell from that pre Pretty early on in my teenage years and was not a believer But it I was always fascinated by some of the kind of deeper metaphysical questions that the I've been taught as a child in my religious upbringing And so maybe there was another part of me that was interested in Finding a place where I could think through those things a bit more. What is the relationship between? know The material world and the spiritual world is there such a thing as the spiritual world and things like that Do you think this is what makes you different from other philosophers You know sometimes so when I was in graduate school when I was an undergraduate and then in graduate school There was a push, you know client and all of that to think that abstract objects were very suspect and We shouldn't believe in abstract objects. We should just believe in material particulars And I had always thought material particulars are pretty weird. I don't really understand them What is matter anyway, and I think that so I wrote my my dissertation in graduate school on the problem of persistence through change So what how is it that a material particular can persist through change? You know doesn't it every time it undergoes any sort of alteration it goes out of existence What is the essence, you know, what does matter for you know all of these sorts of things? these were very mysterious to me and I wrote my my PhD on those topics and I think yeah, there was a way in which I was cutting against the grain because I did find The abstract world also the aesthetic world the spiritual world. Those are things that have always been very meaningful to me art and aesthetics and and spirituality and Going into philosophy. It was like no, it's all physical particulars Physical particular after another and I'm going what what are those things physical particulars anyway? I don't even know what matter is and so it might have been It might have been something like that. Okay, so aside from George Beeler. Who else influence your overall philosophical ideas? Well, David Reeve did he was he was someone who worked on Aristotle among other things and I am Very interested in Aristotle have been for a long time George Miro is someone who died in 87. I think He was very said he died of AIDS. He was young. He was in his early 50s. He was my dissertation supervisor He was a brilliant man and he was someone who was very interested in kind of transcendental arguments and things like that And so I'm George but also very analytic and so George Paul Grice Alan Code those were all people who influenced me in my coming up in Graduate school, but since then I've been influenced by Ian hacking Maryland Fry Nancy Bauer Simone de Beauvoir Marks I mean it's sort of my You know, it's like, oh my gosh, there's just a whole world out there of people who Elizabeth Anderson has influenced me a lot So I think I'm kind of a mishmash of methods and styles Yeah, so in what way has your philosophy training influenced your overall way of thinking about anything Yeah, that's a really interesting question so I As was probably clear I grew up in a In a family that was not very philosophical and in fact, it was very conservative in waspy my My parents were Republicans My father was a traditional patriarch of our family and I Had some experiences and so I was so I was born in 55 So I was not exactly part of the civil rights movement and the women's movement of the 60s because I wasn't really old enough But I was influenced by those sorts of things and became very interested in Social justice issues, but I had no tools for understanding social justice And I then started doing metaphysics which had kind of come up through my religious background But there came a point when my activism Felt like it was it needed a kind of intellectual enrichment and my philosophy was a bit too sterile And so that combination of bringing philosophy to my activism Has really had a huge impact on my life. So I feel so my my philosophical work is very influenced by my Political work, but my political work is also influenced by By a philosophy because as I was reading more philosophers and reading more feminist theorists and critical race theorists and such My understanding of the world Really profoundly changed and I began to see Social systems and how social systems work and how systemic justice works and and that was important to me This is sort of a personal question but When you were studying you said that you were in graduate school Was there a significant event in society or During that time that really influenced you to go into activism or maybe there was a significant event in your life that triggered this Yeah, so I I've written about this and also I mean it's a public fact about me So I don't hesitate to share it with you even though it's very personal but when I was a a senior in as an undergraduate I Was asleep in bed and and someone broke into my apartment and with a knife and I was raped and That changed my life. I mean I I was enraged and I just couldn't believe That you know that for no reason for no reason at all this terrible violence And very traumatic experience had happened to me. And so I became quite Committed to Feminist work that was opposing rape culture and violence against women and domestic violence issues and those matter In a way that I couldn't put it down It was just pressing on me in a deeply personal way And then as time went on I became more interested in race and more interested in class and then more interested in disability So but it really started with that experience of of rage In in the face of this violent act Okay, so Let's get to your social construction idea. So one of your big ideas in philosophy is the social construction of race and gender What does social construction imply and why does it mean what does it mean for something to be socially constructed? It's a really good question and a pretty hard one so So the idea of social construction Often emerges in the context of a kind of debunking project So on one end you can say well social construction just means caused by Social causes or social factors where there's a social factor involved in the production of it, etc And that's the kind of loosest possible understanding But very often when you say that something is socially constructed what you're trying to do is Criticize or debunk a kind of naturalistic understanding of it So when you say gender is socially constructed What you're saying is gender is just is not determined entirely by sex or by physical features when you say race is socially constructed You're saying race is not a biological category It's a social category. And so one of the reasons to do that is that much of the ideology of racism and sexism Presupposes that women are by nature Submissive nurturing inferior whatever that people of color say black people are no violent or or lazy or No less intelligent, etc, etc like that Um, and so this idea that this is all happening by nature Seems to justify the treatment of women and the treatment of people of color In a way that is unjust and so the social constructionist comes in and says no, you're wrong these categories are categories that you've created and The features of those categories the general characteristics that you attribute to those categories Have been produced by the very systems That have created the categories to start with so it's a it's a kind of debunking effort To dislodge certain background assumptions that fuel injustice or or undergird injustice Okay, so let me try to understand this so your social construction idea is something like here's a reductionist account of what it is for what it is for someone to be gender and you're saying that that's not the only thing that's going on So you're not just reducing gender in terms of sex Or in terms of biology So there are some social structures going on Yeah, and people will talk about it in different ways there's some people when when they think about gender for example, they're just thinking about Gender identity some people when they think about race they just think about racial identity and and that Already is saying look gender isn't just a matter of your body It's how you identify race isn't just a matter of your body and your you know Phenotype and your skin color and hair texture. It's about how you identify and so that already is a kind of debunking But my view I have a particular approach to social construction where I'm interested in Seeing these social categories as position within a broad social structure So my version of social construction isn't the only version of social construction. They're all kinds Of ones. I mean another thing to point out is that There's a difference that Ian hacking Talks about that. I think it's important to about the social construction of a concept and the social construction of a real material Sort of category of people and so you say well a concept is socially constructed just means that well There's a particular history that enable it that a concept to evolve as something that we talk about a way that we use it Etc. And we could have had a different concept. That's a Notion of social construction that is used in the literature, especially less so in philosophy But in other fields, but there's another notion of social construction where what we're talking about is how how sort of a racial group What makes what's what does a racial good to the members of a racial group have in common? What makes them a racial group? What is it in virtue of which they are raced? As white or etc. And we're talking about the concrete reality not a concept and and how do we understand these groups in the world? And and what are the causes and the sources of those groups in the world? And that's what I'm interested in and that's where I'm interested in talking about you know laws and social systems and norms etc etc that that are playing a role in producing identities such as a racial identity or a class identity Okay, so you mentioned about Ian hacking's idea of social construction But how does your view differ from other social constructionists or constructivists like Bruno Latour Burger and Lachman and Paul Bocca-Pichain and John Cerro Well, I think that there are some people who are inclined to think that They focus on the the concept and they think oh this concept is socially constructed and we use it to understand the world But there's nothing really corresponding to it So when sometimes when people say race is socially constructed what they mean is race isn't real It's an illusion we go around in the world thinking there are races because but that Concept has come down to us through these problematic processes and there really are no such thing as races So which so, you know, which is like this the concept of wish to socially constructed Witches are socially constructed and ideas look somewhere this idea came from but there's nothing corresponding to it, right? It's it's and that's going to be on one approach to thinking about this. So race is like which Whereas others like John Cerro are inclined to think more of Institutions so they are interested when they're thinking about social ontology is sort of what makes something money Or what makes something the Supreme Court or what makes something and they have in mind this this Action what he calls the assignment of a status function Where we decide that pieces of paper that look a certain way and little pieces of metal that look in certain way are going to be Holders of value and the medium of exchange, right? And so so they end up being money Or that a certain group of people get to be the Supreme Court Because we have designated them as the Supreme Court So they have this idea that well institutions and such are created by us by our collective intentions and My view differs from both of these So I think that that societies are Best understood as a collection of systems Systems that organize things of value and we need to coordinate in order to distribute produce you know Get rid of things of value and things of disvalue and to exchange them until there are these systems of coordination that That are responding to An agreement about what is valuable or what is not and The way those systems work is they because they have a division of labor for example They organize us about who does the cooking and who does and and who does the The leadership and who does the ruling and who does this and that and the other thing and these are all systems That are ways of organizing people and so the way I think of social construction is that sometimes in these systems there are groups of people that function in particular nodes in the system and Those are going to be naturalized sometimes Because we want to think that their place in the system is sort of given and can't be changed so I think women are are situated in a system of Reproduction sexuality and child care and those sorts of things and then we say and this is a System that has been created by us as part of a distribution of labor and then we say well Yeah, but women love to do those things or it's natural for them to do those things or that's determined by their biology that So masking the fact that it's just a product of the fact that we have organized ourselves In this particular way and so on my view they're very real, right? It's very hard to get out of that node in the system Because you're going to be pushed into it and there's going to be similarities between you and other people in that node But what we do when we say it's socially constructed we debunk the idea that it's natural or inevitable or in mutable so Could you explain this further like for example in the case of gender race and class so Can you give more examples about these kinds of systems? Yes, definitely So one of the best ways to sort of Think about it is historically for race and class in particular and how economic systems needed certain groups of people to do certain kinds of labor and One story about slavery in the United States is that At a certain point in time There were there were people With different origins from Europe from Africa from many different places from Latin America who had Come and they were they were some of them indentured servants and some of them They were working for low wages, etc. And some of them were slaves and they um, and they were being exploited by The the landowners the plantation owners and such like that And there came a moment where it was very important to prevent this group of people from gaining solidarity and protesting the kind of Treatment that they were getting in the hands of the landowners And so the landowners figured and this is a I'm not going to try to defend this in great detail But it's a kind of case study a sort of example that others have developed barber fields in particular Where they decided look we want these these white folks not to the poor white Not to rise up against us the rich whites So we're going to divide and conquer we're going to make it clear that we are of the same group as the poor whites meaning the the wealthy whites and Get them to hate the blacks right and to not want to have anything to do with I'm not identified with them Not form solidarity groups with them etc etc in order to maintain this power and control Now one of the things that's very noticeable. That's very interesting about this case is that you can See someone skin color from a distance you can you don't have to know them And so it was also a way to create laws that said if you're black You should be you're enslaved you're a slave So that they could identify from a distance Who should be captured and taken back to the their owner so to speak their so to speak on it And so they had a system of Maintaining power and control over the poor whites and the blacks by dividing them and by Maintaining a system of slavery that could be could be legalized and enforced Because of skin color as a basis for this for this, you know horrible institution And so what you see then is that whoa this this division between white and black in the United States Was not a division about who worked hard or who was intelligent or who did anything like that That wasn't the story that created this division between whites and blacks It was it was a product of a kind of capital capitalist sort of maneuver to Divide and conquer and then this became absolutely important right because white people didn't want to be Allied with black people if you were then that was going to be punished black people were you know enslaved they were prevented from getting educated and and having all kinds of Opportunities and so then they started then here's the looping effect if you don't give people an education They're not going to be able to read most of them And then the fact that they can't read makes it seem well They shouldn't vote because they're not they're not able to read so they shouldn't vote And we need educated voters and then if they're not voting they can't hold public office You know they can't do all of this and so there's a looping effect that keeps a particular group of people poor Uneducated and not represented and so that's the kind of story that that social constructionist want to tell About how race emerges in a particular social and economic context Yes, and it's we haven't broken free from this. No, it's Domino, yes. Oh, it's totally. I mean this is like Michelle Alexander's views you know slavery in the u.s. And then Jim Crow which was a system of of Legal segregation and now mass incarceration and there was this constant and the pitiful Nature of American education, right? This is all still happening and there's this looping effect. Okay, so they're black So they're not Educable so we're not going to give them an education and then you know There's a there's a whole system there that reinforces the creation of this category Where it's not a natural category. It's a socially imposed category Okay, I like Sorry, I like the I like the explanation here. So you're dealing with real things Emergent things emergent categories. You're not about you're not concerned about just concepts And you're also not concerned about institutional facts per se But more of how this kind of power structure power relations structure brought about and continuously bring about this type of social structures or social categories That's right. It's a set of social relations. So social relations are relations like landlord tenant employer employee husband and wife You know parents and children Neighbors, I mean, there's all of these social relations that we stand in And with those social relations come norms. So you're supposed to treat your neighbor differently than You know someone who's from somewhere else. I you know, you you you know, you around here You shovel help them shovel their sidewalks and you and you help them by Bringing them food if they're sick and things like this. So these are kind of relations that are not No one came along and said I hereby designate you a neighbor There's no like surly an assignment of status function Is that these are relationships that kind of emerge and then norms are associated with them And then exchange becomes possible At et cetera, et cetera So it's it's a much more organic conception of society And society evolves them and it evolves given certain pressures pressures well under capitalism pressures for profit, but also pressures to You know care and to love. I mean, this is something what the news bomb talks about is that we are caring people So right now under covet you see that there's an incredible outpouring of caring and concern That wouldn't necessarily have been obvious under normal conditions But there's these ties and networks of connections and networks of relationships That become more significant and more important When the circumstances change as dramatically as they have and then You know, the society starts to change because you know, the society is made up of these relations Okay, so your work in the social construction of gender and race does not only aim to provide the theory of the social categories You also aim to provide a social critique So how do you understand the idea of a social critique here? Is this a kind of revisionist style or ideological change or political change? So I think of it as One form of social critique is ideology critique and I think that The social constructionist strategy of saying what you think is natural or inevitable or immutable or something Is not actually so And so there's a critique of a certain set of background assumptions and background beliefs And so that sort of leverages us to see new possibilities for women new possibilities for disabled people new possibilities for the elderly and things like that because You know, not all elderly people are frail not all elderly people are You know asexual things like this So you begin to allow for the possibility of different Different ways of relating to members of the group because you can see it's not natural or inevitable or whatever that people Have certain features that members of the group have those features um But the real issue for social critique is what makes A social system one of these social organizations unjust Because you can you know, there are many perspectives from which you can criticize the particular social formations that we live in And so there is this question Well, when can you say the system is unjust? Yeah, you're right Yeah, so I think that that you know, if you're just interested if you want to say, okay We know that violence against women is in just we know that um The police brutality against people of color and mass incarceration. Those are unjust Sometimes what we do in social critique is that we just say, okay This is something that we have enough of a consensus about That the police should not kill black people Um for no reason that domestic violence and rape is wrong Then you can say, okay, then what you do is you undertake social critique to figure out Why is it that this is accepted or common or What are the structures that sustain it because it's not just an individual, right? It's not just bad actors The police are part of a system That allow and they're trained and they're permitted and they're In fact even encouraged To take a certain approach toward the constituency that they're supposed to protect So what you do then when you do a social critique is you say it's not just bad actors It's not just an individual is part of the system in the norms and the values and the institutions That make up the system that have to be criticized So this is where the defund the police in the united states is what they're doing is they're saying look The police one of the problems with the police in the u.s. Is they're allowed to carry Assault weapons. I mean they they have tanks. They have these military style equipment But this is ridiculous because you don't need this to actually protect the citizens Because oftentimes what's happening is that they come across someone who's mentally ill or they come across someone who is homeless And you know, they don't need an assault weapon So part of what the defund the police does is it says the structure that gives police officers this military equipment Is creating circumstances that make them Um, uh, scary to people and so people don't want to cooperate with them But then they've been taught if someone doesn't cooperate with you The part of the defund the police is no you ought to invest in Social workers mental health workers drug rehab all of these other things take that money that's going into military style weapons and put it into sustaining and protecting an environment I mean in a neighborhood or a community So that people can live together in peace and justice So that is a way of saying don't just say it's this bad police actor Criticize the system. So that's part of what social critique does Yes, I think this is also very much applicable to the rest of the world Because uh, at least here in the Philippines that also that's also what happens now when it comes to police abuse and other such actions from authorities so to speak Yeah, and I'd like to talk about your recent commentary on kate man's Down girl You argued against battery arky here as the main cause of Oppression I think this is also very much related to your discussion on police brutality So you identified capitalism as a source as well. Can you talk about this further? Yeah, so um So i'm interested as I mentioned in thinking about society as Kind of a system of systems um And the way I think about the systems is that Well, one way to think about systems is that they're organized around The resource that they distribute. So for example a health care system Distributes healthcare health, you know well-being A transportation system Distributes mobility An economic system distributes wealth and they don't just distribute it, but they produce it, right? It's producing and and distributing well One question that has been um part of the feminist debates You know for 50 years is is patriarchy a system and if so, what does it distribute? um and For a long time People wanted to say well, what happens is that there's patriarchy Which manages and controls reproduction and sexuality And then there's a different system capitalism, which manages and controls wealth and then there's racism that will be a white supremacy That manages and controls. Well, we're not quite sure right. What does it manage and control? Well, I guess labor possibly Status possibly but this model doesn't seem to me to work so well um because I don't really see gender as like transportation That it's a resource that gets, you know organized and passed around. I mean sexuality might be But I don't think that the only site for the creation of gender is sexuality or is reproduction and such and I also think that you can't really think of patriarchy as a single system without understanding that it's also embedded in capitalism and white supremacy So all of these different systems are deeply embedded with each other these big systems So what I'd like to think of is There are we live in this complicated system of systems healthcare systems education systems transportation systems political systems economic systems we live in this and What happens is that there are dimensions of those systems that privilege men There are dimensions that privilege cis people. There are dimensions that privilege White people dimensions that privilege rich people able-bodied people etc But the systems that we're really talking about and that we have to intervene in Are these systems like healthcare policing? Politics economy and things like that. And so really what we need to do is acknowledge That these are the systems that are distributing the resources And yes, they privilege some groups of people and and subordinate other groups of people But they do it in a way that can't really be separated as patriarchy white supremacy capitalism. They're all embedded with one another So I think that this is in fact what intersectionality teaches us It teaches us that you can't think about healthcare Merely from the point of view of gender or merely Point of view of race or merely from the point of view of wealth You have to see that all of those things are embedded in any particular Practice in healthcare any particular practice in education is going to be inflected by these different Launchings of power and privilege. So what I'm inclined to say is yes, the system is patriarchal It's white supremacist. It's capitalist. It's ableist But these aren't separate systems themselves. They are just kind of Forms of injustice That occur in healthcare in transportation in education in the economy, etc, etc Does that make sense Yes, but correct in terms of our understanding correct us if if we're wrong because Are you opposed to the intersectional analysis of oppression or do you actually affirm this? I affirm it. So I have to let you know that I have a student who I'm in constant She's a now graduate. She's no longer my student. She's a phd. She has her own job But she's giving me grief about this like what is it? What difference does it make if they're the same system or different systems? Why are you worried about this? Is it really that important etc? So I recognize that that it's not the clearest or the most well-defended thing I've ever said um, but what I'm trying to say is that um intersectionality has to be understood not as White supremacy and patriarchy interacting with each other as two separate systems but as the way that um The systems that organize the resources that we're interested in like health and food and education and things like this they and one in the same time they privilege along the lines of race and gender and wealth and But that privileging is built into how this distribution of resources is going It's not a separate system Like patriarchy is not a separate system that is working there. It's a way that these systems work These transportation these more material systems. Let's put it this way These are material systems that I'm interested in these material systems are shaped So that certain people end up getting the goods and other people end up being deprived of the goods and so what I'm interested in is the is the processes by which all of these systems end up stratifying society And I don't think it's helpful to think oh, no Well, then you just add another system on top of the transportation system. It's called the gender system or it's called white supremacy No, because White supremacy is in every system. It's not just its own system If that makes if that makes sense Okay, if I just may have a follow-up question. So you're talking about uh, for example, uh, the white So we termed it term it like As such, no, it's a white capitalist supremacist patriarchy, et cetera, et cetera now if you look at this these This intersectional systems, no, so you you What's important here is that we also look at the bigger structures such as health Transportation defense finance in order for us to overcome these injustices. Am I correct? Right. So so that's the right ending. So so maybe it's useful to think of A material system and a material system is a system that is directly organizing us to distribute often a material good right material good like health and education and transportation and you know Power and the polity and those sorts of things citizenship Okay, so these are the systems that are doing that are that are organizing us No Once you see and there are many different ways of organizing us, right? You could do you could have all these different kinds of education and health and whatever systems like that In the society a society picks a particular configuration of these systems in order to make itself work Some societies organize all that So it creates a racial hierarchy Some of the societies do that in a way that it creates A class hierarchy the capitalist ones and some of them do it in a way that creates a gender hierarchy and so what we have to do is Being in the context of health care and politics and the economy and all of these things because Each of those places where the system is making a distribution The process by which it makes the distribution is encoding racial privilege and gender privilege and class privilege and ability privilege all at the same time Right, so it's doing that and so those are the sites of intervention And so maybe another way to put it is I don't know how To fight for gender justice In and of itself in the system of gender I know how to fight for gender justice in politics and the economy and health care In education and these sorts of things and sexuality But these are our material systems and what i'm trying to do is locate Those moments or those places in those systems Where women are are systematically disadvantaged and so yeah, you could say, you know, that's a way of speaking Okay, the system of patriarchy is the system That unites and organizes how all of these subsystems Subordinate women but the problem is I don't think it's systematic. I think I think it's kind of a mess. I think and that's what gives me hope The fact that it's kind of working this way here It kind of work in that way there and and there's different mechanisms by which it's working And the fact that it's as fragmented as it is gives me hope that we can leverage change And and make progress because you're going to start undoing it in all of the different sites where it occurs I don't know if that makes sense You're you're pushing me at the limits of my ability to make sense of my own view I'm just curious. How does your view differ from the likes of Bell hooks, for example, or iris marion young who talked about these systems of oppression as well So I don't really think of hooks or or young as really doing the systems approach I think that uh or I mean, I think that A lot of what hooks is talk talks about is Identities and social norms that are part certainly a crucial part of the process But I see her as less Materialist than I am in the sense of a kind of marxian materialist I see her as a cultural cultural theorists and a cultural critic And doing really important work and showing us how symbols and norms and an ideology Really plays a crucial role in understanding These social categories and I like to be more grounded in kind of the materiality and in a and a marxian sense maybe of how What are the real resources that are being distributed and and what Criteria of injustice Should we bring into this to say that this way of distributing the good stuff Is flawed or or unjust I don't see myself at odds with hooks I just see it as a matter of emphasis because of course. I always also care about ideology and about ideology critique Young's work. I'm also a very very sympathetic to she I think is a bit more materialist about this more like how I am And I think I can't think of I mean, I don't really think of myself At odds with young I feel like more I'm Tracing out some of the themes in her work Um to develop them and sort of put them in a slightly different framework Um, but I don't see myself as as doing something Radically different than what she was doing Okay, so you mentioned answer your question So yes, thank you. Thank you So you mentioned about injustices and our idea that some some social structures are unjust So does it mean that this idea of being unjust or being just this outside the system? What I'm asking is whether yeah, and what I'm asking here is whether ethics is Somewhere out there not in not part of our society itself Yeah, great question. Um, so I've recently I'll have a paper on this. It's called political epistemology and social critique and it's on my website So people can find it if they want hasn't been published yet But I think that much of ethics and political philosophy Tries to Use our intuitions about what is right and wrong and good and bad to come up with a an ideal theory of Of how one ought to live And how we ought to organize ourselves and organize our societies in a very abstract way um I think that this process suffers pretty seriously from status quo bias And I think that a lot of our beliefs about the world Of the normative beliefs we have are flawed And that they're flawed because we've grown up And been Tutored to have a certain ideology about what's good and bad and right and wrong And then what happens through this process Is that we reflect on our Considered judgments and then we canonize them and put them in some kind of abstract structure and then Evaluate our world in light of that and I think that's a very flawed way to think about critique and think about justice Um, so I think that we can't you know just jump outside of our framework Um and say okay, okay, so all of you people are just doing sort of internal cleaning things up and But neither can we jump completely outside of it because we have to use some tools to think with them We've got the tools we've got um, but I my moral epistemology is really grounded in consciousness raising so if koon Thomas koon had a view about scientific progress where There was a paradigm that organized us to make sense of a range of phenomena But the paradigms were always Inadequate in some way or other they always had recalcitrant data or Places where they didn't work or the explanations fell apart And what would happen is that people who were interested in those places where there are things falling apart Would propose an alternative paradigm that could do justice to that phenomenon That was Inadequately understood from the main paradigm and lots of the other stuff as well And they could say oh my gosh. Look this reveals aspects of the world that we haven't seen before this reveals connections that had been invisible to us Well probably speaking I think that's what consciousness raising does in the moral domain What happens is that there are people who are marginalized who Are not captured by the mainstream moral categories by the mainstream political You know sense of justice And they you come together and there's a process by which it's not just you as an individual But you together with a group of people who are similarly situated Try to come up with a better interpretation of what's going on a better interpretation Where I really want to hold it to epistemic standards of betterness It does better justice to the phenomenon It's coherent etc etc etc. We can aim for some kind of situated objectivity And then you said look this is a different paradigm That shows If we think about things this way we gain moral knowledge So I think for example domestic violence right back in the day You know domestic violence that was just a private matter Between in the private sphere of a a man and his wife and children or something And so the police couldn't intervene there was going to be It's probably what she deserved a set of assumptions around domestic violence, right? And then what the consciousness raising did is say No, this is domestic violence and public violence Are both assaults on individuals who are entitled to their rights And you can't say just because my husband did it to me. It's not an assault It is still an assault And so there's a kind of paradigm shift for under for breaking down the public private distinction And that's a kind of move that came out of consciousness raising About from people who were suffering from domestic violence and the women And and some men who had some children who had experienced this So there I think that what you gain is moral knowledge. You gain moral knowledge that The fact that it's done Behind closed doors in someone's house Doesn't make it permissible, right? It's impermissible there just as it's impermissible by a stranger on the street And that kind of knowledge is achieved. So so what i'm suggesting is that that instead of having a sort of abstract Moral philosophy that's done in a seminar run What you do is you reach people who are marginalized Whose experience of the moral, you know of of injustice is is Hurting um and you bring them together Uh or bring us together because it's not like the That the authorities are going to bring them together and say you guys figure it out. It's you know, we Create a movement and we work together to try and come up with a new paradigm to understand What is unjust here? Why is this unjust? How is it affecting us? And one of the advantages of that view Is that it's more able to deal with the historical and cultural specificity of wrong And how you are going to overcome that historical and cultural specificity So the legacy of slavery in the united states the legacy of the holocaust In and germany and europe these are historical legacies that that creates Frames of meaning and understanding and to come in and you said okay We're just going to give an abstract story of how reparations is going to work No, you can't do that Because reparations are a response to a historical wrong And so by using consciousness raising of the people who are directly affected You can then begin to think about how to reshape The society how to reshape the norms how to reshape the social relations in a way that's going to be more just How do these social critiques Uh Apply to the current global situation in particular the cobit 19 pandemic Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit easier to think about how it works for black lives matter because that has a longer history in the civil rights movement and the and the Resistance that has gone on for a very long time in the context of of the united states um And so understanding that history the history of malcomax and working with the king and the history of The segregation and the history of the great migration This is important for understanding how reparations Might or might not work um and covet I think It interacts with a lot of different issues and it's fairly new so my analysis of it is it's much less developed but clearly it interacts with issues of racing racism and class and who counts as essential workers and such like that um and health care and the difficulty in the united States because We don't have we don't have decent health care But one place where I think it's quite interesting is consciousness raising about what counts as an essential worker now in the us The the restrictions on mobility and work and all of that Divided essential workers from Inessential workers essential workers were people who you know drove the buses worked in Worked in pharmacies Or otherwise worked in medical care But it's not just that there were other people like hardware stores were open various things were open and And essential workers were the people I mean grocery store workers people who unpack You know Groceries or or the truckers who bring the groceries. These are all essential workers Well, many of these people are people who are ordinarily invisible, right? They're they're invisible They're incredibly exploited. They don't get any recognition And so in the context of covet there's a possibility of a kind of consciousness raising About who is an essential worker? It's not the bankers It's not the real estate brokers It's not the you know people who are making megabucks the people who are essential to maintain life in our society Are the people who are the least well respected the least recognized the least well paid And so this gives a moment for sort of during consciousness raising and and building a movement that could potentially Gain more recognition and more pay et cetera et cetera. I don't see it happening right at the moment I mean I see the appreciation of essential workers whether it's going to change the economy But you know, they did they were getting much more unemployment the people who had and people who More recognition that the the medical workers need insurance These are things that that or have greater recognition, but it hasn't yet flipped into a full-blown movement Okay, so you're not only a professor of philosophy. You're also a social advocate as you can see So what is is it like to work with other radical thinkers or would you consider yourself as a radical thinker in the first place? I hope I'm a radical thinker. I think that that's a that's a term of honor And I don't think it's it's something that I could really attribute to myself Because it would be claiming a kind it would be a kind of hubris and arrogance to say but I I aspire to be a radical thinker um I think uh It's a it's a it's it's a wonderful thing to have a community of people to Think through these things with and I do have a very strong feminist philosophy community I have a a group of a critical race theorists and critical race philosophers. I I work with um I have another group of people who are just a bunch of old 60s 70s radicals who are uh do our philosophers And we just we we read articles in certain journals and go. Oh my god. I can't Yeah Um, and then I try to find other things that are uh that are are more supportive of our points of view um But I also feel as though I have a lot of other people in the academy um at MIT and other places across The united states and elsewhere in europe Who care about these issues and we try to leverage our power as academics to make a difference Make a difference to help other people in the academy, but also raise questions about How our society is structured? um And that's a really that that keeps me going that keeps me Keeps keeps me getting up every day and working my butt off every day um Because that's what really matters to me and I do love writing and I love doing philosophy and I love teaching I'm teaching this term a course on gender and development with another radical About how to how to make a difference in development Without having it be a kind of colonial effort or a an effort of of privilege and power But how to empower groups of people? Waste pickers how to empower waste pickers how to empower Sex workers how to empower People who are AIDS orphans How do you do that in a way that is politically? Appropriate and especially in this class where gender is an important issue So those are things that I I really love so I try as much as possible to integrate my activism in my research and in my teaching and But I also just have to I have a backpack that's a it's a clear backpack That has the bottle of water and uh, and um some goggles for tear gas. It has Card as an id. I don't include my driver's license. My card is an id. It includes a tambourine So that I can like sound I need a tambourine because I'm often holding a sign And so you can't clap so you need a tambourine. You know anyway, so I have it ready to go. I have I have probably 10 different foam core boards with different things written on them ready to go at the top of the hat Yeah, so that work matters to me too What's your advice to people who are currently struggling in their careers in academic philosophy While trying to balance their social and radical adversities like you Yeah Well, I'm really lucky at this point in my career because I'm very secure In my in my academic life Um, I sometimes can't believe that other people refuse to sign certain petitions or something because of their career. I'm going Oh my god, you're a tenured professor at MIT. What is going to happen to you? Right? Um, You know, it just makes me feel crazy. It's like, yeah, I'm ready. I'm out there, right? What are they going to do to me? They can't do anything to me Um, uh In this particular sociohistorical moment at MIT. They're not going to do anything to me. Um, but I think that there are other people who are much more precarious and much more vulnerable and And I think that they do need to make um strategic decisions about Protecting themselves and their careers and their livelihoods Um and in ways that I don't and those strategic decisions. It's very difficult to make general recommendations about them because people are so very differently situated um a question that does come up is whether it's Whether I mean this came up throughout my whole career Is it should I stay in philosophy? Should I continue to be an academic or should I Just become a full-time activist A community organizer A law professor Not even a professor a lawyer. Um, who is more on the front lines and I'm not convinced that That being a philosophy professor is the best way to promote social justice, but I did Have a conversation with someone many many years ago. Her name is Mitsu Yamada She's a japanese-american poet and essayist And I knew her because I was doing activist Since she was also doing activist work and I Submit to you. I don't I just can't believe I'm going to spend my life, you know Doing philosophy and in university When there's so much injustice in the world and why why am I doing this? and she said well She had been interned in the japanese concentration camp in the united states when when she was young And she's written her poetry and some of her essays are about that and She said well, you know I've done a lot of activism in my life I've walked in a lot of marches and I've organized groups of people and I've done this and I've done that But the thing that has had the most impact. I believe is my writing Because once you write something and you publish it it goes out into the world And it can spread and you don't have to do anything It just does it and you don't know where it goes and then someone you walk up to You know 20 years later said they wrote a poem of yours or an essay of yours or this or that and they changed their life And you say you cannot under your estimate the the power of of writing the power of the word and if you can find ways To write and even if your work isn't The word that spreads, but it affects people who write things that spread That this is a way to have an impact and you cannot underestimate the value of that so That meant a lot to me it meant I meant very much very much to me and um I think I've I've felt that the combination of of being a writer and having some authority by virtue of my academic position where I have Voice than some others do That I could use that power and that capability to try and and make important change now or or passing a law that you know the Violence against women after something like that, but I think we all have to do What is meaningful to us and was was within our realm of capabilities? I also learned as an activist. I'm not that good as an activist. I'm good at showing up But I do have this problem. We're in an activist group and where people are saying we have to do this next And we have to do this next I have a tendency to say Oh, I think I need to read a little bit more about that or we need to think about that a little bit more whatever I'm a little I'm a little bit in my head And I have skills But I'm not the best leader activist organizer in the world So what I decided for me And each person has to decide for themselves that the combination of skills that I have and what I can offer And that and the opportunities That were available to me that this was was a way to go, but I don't think it's the obvious way to go I think that it's a very difficult set of choices Okay, so finally as a philosopher, you have devoted most of your life thinking about things that matter in our social lives Would you say that this career is worth it? Um Yeah, that's a really good question It's hard to know There's a I mean, I It's been meaningful to me So if you say is it worth it to me Oh my god. Yes. I mean, it's it's all consuming. It's it's gives me great joy. It gives me great despair You know, it's everything and and so it's worth it to me But is it worth it in the sense that that all this effort has it really made any difference at all? um I think those are the sorts of things that one can't can't necessarily you can't necessarily know that right now in the middle of it um, there's a wonderful quote By oh, I'm not going to be able to get it because I'm in full screen If you go on my website um Sally haslanger.weebly.com and you go there in the far right. It says favorite quotes There's a passage by Rebecca Solnit from her book um, hoping the dark and in it She says sometimes i'm in a paraphrase and she says it beautifully of course sometimes a person those words, you know inspire movement and sometimes um her words affect people who affect people who affect people And the movement comes across comes upon us like a change in the weather And it and it just feels to me as though you know impact I don't know And if I had done something else, maybe I would have You know gotten too depressed to do anything or maybe I would have just been really bad at it Counterfactuals are really hard for me to evaluate. But is this a meaningful life for me? Yes Yes Okay, and I have to say I want to also include my family So my family is Is a really important part of my life and not just as You know A group of people I love But I I believe that I I live in a non traditional family And I believe that it that it has had Made it made a difference. I believe that I I'm exemplifying my values in my family and my children are carrying these values forward And that means a lot to me Okay, so thanks sally for sharing your time with us and I hope you guys learned a lot from this interview Join me again for another episode of philosophy and not matters where we talk about things that matter from a philosophical point of view Cheers