Oppression is a form of injustice that occurs when one social group is subordinated while another is privileged, and oppression is maintained by a variety of different mechanisms including social norms, stereotypes, and institutional rules. A key feature of oppression is that it is perpetrated by and affects social groups. In this article I show that because of the central role that groups play in theories of oppression, those theories face significant, and heretofore mostly unrecognized, metaphysical problems. I then identify resources from analytic metaphysics that can be used to address these problems. I show that, although we should not be pessimistic about the prospects for a viable theory of oppression, it will take serious metaphysical work to develop a plausible ontology of oppression, and existing theories have for the most part failed to respond to this challenge.
The view that there is a distinction between strong, or metaphysical, emergence and weak, or explanatory, emergence, is widely accepted. It is natural, on this view, to regard accounts of strong and of weak emergence as performing different kinds of work, such that strong conceptions of emergence help us to uncover metaphysical structure, while weak conceptions of emergence help us to understand the limits of our scientific explanations. If we accept this division of labor, then it appears that we cannot use an account of weak, explanatory emergence to find out about metaphysical structure.In this paper, I explore the view that explanatory conceptions of emergence cannot be used for metaphysical purposes, and argue that it is false. Even those who reject strong emergence can, at least in principle, use certain explanatory accounts of emergence as guides to metaphysical structure. On this approach, emergence itself is explanatory, but explanatory emergence may sometimes obtain for metaphysical reasons.
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