Yesterday I went to my university’s Title IX training. We were taught about everything from not to rape our colleagues to how to deal with a student who comes to us because of discrimination, harassment, or violence related to her/his sex/gender. I found the particulars of how to deal with students in distress very helpful. I did, however, wonder about raping and stalking advice. I imagine that not a single audience member found the advice useful. If someone had, that would itself be sign of something deeply troubling. One might debate the wisdom of dating colleagues or telling off-color jokes in the workplace, but no one in their right mind would defend rape or stalking. A cynical person would suspect that the training was mainly for legal purposes should the university be sued. But what’s even better than having a good defense if you’re sued? It is not getting sued in the first place. So I’m assuming that the point was at least partially to provide some actual training.
Leading off training with rape and stalking is unhelpful, we can all agree. It overshadows what are most likely to be problems in the workplace: sexual harassment and discrimination based on sex or gender identity. The stories we were given were either historical—so seemingly irrelevant to current practices—or vague. One guy would regularly make sexist comment in the workplace, which was a cubicle-like environment in which such comments were widely overheard. What exactly did this guy say? No idea. And this was not the point of the example either. The point was to encourage us to report on each other. For the person who found the sexist comments insidious were not any of the female workers, but the only other guy in the office. The lesson seemed to be this. Even if you are not bothered by something your colleague says, others might be and it is your responsibility to make sure that they are not by reporting him or her. Needless to say, there are all kinds of concerns about this: loyalty to your colleagues, paranoia about being scrutinized, and so on.
So what about providing training that at least also sensitivizes us to things that we might do that we find relatively innocent, but that others would find troubling. I suppose the presenter thought she came close when she said “it’s OK to ask one of your colleagues out, but if you do it every day for months, or you keep making reference to it, it could count as stalking”. Fine. That’s at the same level of helpfulness as to be told not to stalk people. Which is to say, not useful at all. At no point was any real effort made to identify what sorts of behaviors were sexist or discriminatory. It was assumed that such identification was unproblematic and therefore the employees could be left with the entire responsibility for discerning what behavior counts as sex/gender harassment or discrimination.
I find this troubling for a variety of reasons. The greatest challenge we all face is recognizing that actions that we think of as well meaning, or at least neutral, others regard as offensive, hurtful, or sexist. As awareness of sexist practices and discrimination issues has risen, the main instances of sexism in the workplace are likely to be sexism or discrimination that is not thought of as sexism or discrimination. The challenge, then, is not just to get people to report her actions, but to get her to re-conceptualize what she does. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I personally do not mind being complemented on how I dress by colleagues. But other people do, and not just women. I had dinner with an academic once who complained that he felt harassed by his (female) dean who frequently complemented him on his dress. Perhaps the dean was flirting with him. I do not know. But it is perfectly possible that she simply noticed that he was nicer dressed than your average male academic and commented on it without reflecting on how he would feel about being so complemented. In fact, because prototypical cases of harassment are male on female, it may never have occurred to her that he could feel harassed by her. This is not to say that the main problem that we are facing is men being harassed by women. But I think it is a good example of how we might all end up in situations where our own conceptions of what we do differ radically from the other person’s conception. As a women, I know that I am acutely aware of discrimination from men, but I rarely worry that I do things that my male colleagues would find disconcerting. It is easy to become complacent about our actions because we do not conceive of ourselves as the kinds of person who would harass or discriminate against others.
This issue of responsibility for actions that we conceive of in a way very different from how others might conceive of them is something that has concerned me for a while. As I think I mentioned in my intro-post, I am impressed with Plato’s observation that no one knowingly does wrong. If that is right, simply telling someone that he did wrong or punishing him for it, may not have the desired effect, which is for the person to recognized his wrongdoing, repent, and reform. I’ve been told by many working in the prison system that many or most prisoners feel unjustly treated and do not really believe that what they did was wrong. Perhaps it was justified by the exigencies of the situation, perhaps the other person deserved what they got, and so on. But surely we punish, in part, in order to make the person aware that he did wrong. So what to do?
This question ties into the larger question of what the epistemic condition on responsibility is. In other words, what knowledge must an agent have in order to be responsible for her actions. (For simplicity, I assume that if you are responsible for acting wrongly, you are also culpable for it.) Everybody can agree on the limiting cases. A person who flips a switch which ignites a house killing everyone inside is not responsible for killing these people if she had no reason to think that flipping this switch would cause such an event. On the other hand, the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, who orchestrated the event with the intent of exterminating the Tutsis in Rwanda, are clearly responsible for their actions. Most of bad or evil acts lie somewhere between these extremes. People debate, for instance, whether the slave holders of yore can be held responsible for their actions. Focusing on slavery in Ancient Greece, I have argued that people were, in fact, responsible (and culpable) for doing so because there was an inferential route from values that they had to the belief that slavery is wrong (“Values, Sanity, an Responsibility” in D. Shoemaker (Ed.): Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Vol. 1).
One of the obstacles to seeing that what we are doing is wrong is what Michele Moody-Adams calls affected ignorance. Affected ignorance is a form of bad faith. Our actions, practices, or forms of life may involve doing things that we could easily come to know are wrong. For instance, the evils of factory farming are widely known, and yet most consumers continue to eat factory farmed meat (although I put effort into not doing so, I am no exception). Most people know, or at least suspect, that by illegally downloading music, they deprive the creators of that music a way of making a living off their production, but do so anyway. These are probably the two most prevalent cases of affected ignorance now. They they are typically accompanied by a range of justifications that are often surprisingly poor (‘if it were wrong, it wouldn’t be that easy’, e.g.). Affected ignorance is culpable ignorance.
One possibility, then, is that people who sexually harass others are ignoring what they are doing. They omit subjecting their actions to the sort of scrutiny that would make it clear to them that they are, in fact, engaged in practices that, by their own lights, they disagree with. The question now is how to deal with this kind of affected ignorance. There is an argument that this type of affected ignorance can effectively be dealt with by fines, reprimands, and other disciplinary action. In general, affected ignorance is in place because the person believes—perhaps at a less than conscious level—that it is in her interest not to recognize that what she is doing is morally culpable. Actually punishing people will result in changing their incentives. In other words, what you want is for people to stop thinking it is in their interests to ignore the fact that they engage in harassment or discrimination.
I doubt that this is the most common form of harassment and discrimination. For in these cases we typically do not disagree with the classification of what we do as “eating factory farmed meat”, “having slaves”, or “illegally downloading”. Our disagreement is with the moral claim that what we are doing is wrong. In the first case, we may defend ourselves by pointing to the great effort and expense avoiding factory farmed meat would involve (perhaps), and in the other we may point to the perversity of the music industry (not music itself, of course). The problem with Title IX issues is more likely to be that we do not see what we do as discriminating or harassing.
In the next blog, I will talk more about conceiving of what we do under morally relevant descriptions. But because this is probably already too long for a blog post (this is only my second time blogging), I end here.
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