Can the Unfree Be Held Morally Responsible? A Douglassonian Conception of Freedom and Distributed Moral Agency

Abstract

Can those dominated and oppressed by racialized power structures be held responsible for their actions? On some plausible accounts of moral responsibility, the answer is “no”: domination exempts the oppressed from moral obligations because they are structurally deprived of the freedom to make choices for which one might be blameworthy. In this article, I use the work of Frederick Douglass to offer a different understanding of moral responsibility. Attending to specific arguments that Douglass makes regarding the moral responsibility of slaves, and the tensions it raises with other parts of his corpus, I argue that one's ability to act as a moral agent is deeply tied to the environmental resources at their disposal. Drawing on distributed theories of cognition, I offer a Douglassonian conception of “distributed moral agency,” contending that Douglass's writings draw our attention to various environmental factors that can scaffold moral responsibility, even among the enslaved.

Determination from Above

“…Recently, there has been much work on how to think about the autonomy of oppressed agents (e.g., Webster, 2021; Stoljar, 2022; Lee, 2022). Vargas (2018) and Singer (forthcoming) both discuss how oppression threatens responsibility. Still, though there is a connection for Vargas between responsibility and freedom, there has been much less discussion about how oppression threatens freedom of the will.…”