| dc.description.abstract | The concept of false consciousness is understood to involve individuals who
act in ways that contribute to their own oppression, on the basis of ignorant
beliefs that resist revision when confronted with attempts at correction.
And
these beliefs are themselves thought to arise from the individual’s oppressed
conditions. This thesis is an attempt to rehabilitate the concept back into the
toolkit of analytic social philosophy against its detractors. I thus examine the
common problems associated with using this concept in social philosophy,
using the case of women anti-suffragists as a central case study.
I begin with a brief genealogy of the concept of false consciousness, which
attends to the history of the concept as it developed within the Marxian and
Critical Theory traditions, before making a few preliminary clarifications
about how the concept will be defined and used here. I then explain several
challenges to using the concept of false consciousness, suggesting that
detractors of the concept often rely on characterisations of it that sit uneasily
between our emancipatory goals and certain extant approaches to social
epistemology and ontology, normativity, and moral blameworthiness.
The concept of false consciousness is often criticised as an ad hoc
explanation for why someone acts a particular way that is contrary to their
own interests. There is no standard account for why someone has false
consciousness especially under multiple systems of oppression. I address
this by proposing an approach that treats the concept as a means to
regulate social research and direct attention to various looping mechanisms
that sustain oppressive beliefs and practices. These mechanisms converge
upon an individual to produce beliefs that may be shared with other
oppressed agents when seen from the perspective of a system of
oppression. Yet at the same time, such beliefs are nuanced differently at
more agent-targeted levels and in relation to other systems.
Another problem with false consciousness is in determining the appropriate
standard for employing the concept in critique. Standards of critique are
themselves often the very things in dispute. The problem thus lies in needing
to provide a standard of critique that can avoid such disagreement and also
ensure that the standards themselves are not products of false
consciousness. I address this by appealing to the notion of well-being,
which would generate standards that are by definition the agent’s own.
Extant accounts of well-being, however, are inadequate for the task. I thus
outline my own account, grounded in our status as sense-making organisms
and second-order norms regulating our organismic processes.
False consciousness is also often thought to involve victim-blaming, since
the individuals are thought to be irrational or not to know any better.
Using
the concept to pick out the individual as contributing to the very oppression
they experience thus seems to be inappropriate as irrationality and
ignorance are exculpatory in many other cases in ethics. I address this by
focusing on a historical case study of several women anti-suffragists. I first
examine the charges of irrationality and find that the charges do not hold for
them. I then consider the reasons behind their systematic ignorance and find
that they are indeed brought about by culpable mechanisms. In turn, the
women are also culpable for the acts that follow from them. Hence, false
consciousness does not preclude blameworthiness.
I conclude with a brief observation of a tension between moral criticism—
wherein agents are criticised as individuals—and social criticism (critique)—
wherein individuals are criticised in terms of social categories. I suggest that,
although the concept of false consciousness can overcome the above
conceptual problems, it nevertheless appears to have some limited use in
relation to our blaming practices.
This thesis, therefore, is an attempt to clarify, defend, and rehabilitate the
concept of false consciousness, in order to expand the social philosopher’s
toolkit and refine our understanding of social criticism both in philosophy
and public discourse. | en |
