Ashwini Vasanthakumar – 27 January 2023

Colloquium Talk, 27 January 2023, 3-5 pm, Department of Philosophy, UQAM, W-5215

NB: This talk will take place in person only (there is no Zoom or hybrid option). No registration required. For more information, please email Mauro Rossi: rossi.mauro@uqam.ca

TITLE: Appreciating your worth: victims’ duties to repair their self-respect

ABSTRACT: Victims of normalised oppression react to their oppression through denial, acquiescence, resignation, opportunism, subversion, anger, violence, and resistance; they respond instinctively, strategically, and inconsistently; they sometimes destroy one another out of spite or self-interest and other times come together in hope and commiseration. These responses do not take place in a moral vacuum. On the contrary. Victims remain moral agents under oppression, with all that entails, and their responses to their oppression are governed by moral reasons. Certainly, victims engage in rich moral practices of reflection and deliberation, of aid and resistance, and of accountability, argument and blame.

In this chapter, I explore what victims’ self-respect requires of them. Others have argued that victims’ self-respect requires that they resist their oppression or protest their mistreatment. I argue that victims’ have a duty to repair their self-respect. I define self-respect as a robust appreciation of one’s worth; argue that self-respect can generate duties; outline the ways in which normalised oppression undermines victims’ self-respect; and then elaborate on the different mechanisms of repair victims ought to undertake. I conclude with reflections on the relational nature of self-respect and of repairing self-respect, and of how duties of self-respect relate to victims’ other duties of assistance and justice.

BIO: Ashwini Vasanthakumar is an Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Legal and Political Philosophy at Queen’s Law School. She works in normative political and legal theory, with research interests in victims’ duties and oppression; migration; and transitional justice. Her first book, The Ethics of Exile, was published by Oxford in 2021.