Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 33, No. 1, March 2004

The legacies of liberalism and oppressiverelations: facing a dilemma for the subjectof moral educationDwight Boyd*OISE/University of Toronto, Canada

In modern Western moral and political theory the notion of the liberal subject has flourished asthe locus of moral experience, interpretation and critique. Through this conceptual lens onsubjectivity, individuals are enabled to shape and regulate their interactions in arguably desirableways, e.g. through principles of respect for persons and the constraints of reciprocal rights, andmoral education has largely adopted this perspective. However, this article argues that some kindsof morally significant relationsthose framed by social groups related to each other throughstructures of hierarchical powerconstitute a different kind of subjectivity that needs moretheoretical and empirical attention. In contrast to four core characteristics of liberal subjectivity,a view of subjectivity that can be located in how individuals are members of particular kinds ofsocial groups is offered. It is argued that unless it can accommodate working with attention to thisform of subjectivity as well, moral education runs the risk of itself contributing to forms ofoppression such as racism, instead of being a means of combating them.

Preface

I feel extremely honoured to have the opportunity to present the 16th AnnualKohlberg Memorial Lecture; and I would like to extend a special thank you toAdam Niemczynski for inviting me to do so.

This does, indeed, mean a lot to me on a personal, as well as professional, level.I happened to go to Harvard the first year that Larry Kohlberg was there, 1967.Despite the fact that this was graduate school and I had never before taken even onepsychology course, when I saw that there was a new offering in Moral Develop-ment and went to speak to him about my interest, Larry graciously welcomed meinto his seminar. (Perhaps it was because I had read the first article that he publishedin Vita Humana and knew that the second one that he cited as forthcoming inits bibliography did not really exist.) Despite the fact that I wasand remainedinphilosophy, Larry Kohlberg was a true mentor to me.

*Department of Theory and Policy Studies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Universityof Toronto, 252 Bloor Street, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6. Email: dboyd@oise.utoronto.caThis is the text of the 16th Lawrence Kohlberg Memorial Lecture, delivered at the 29th annualconference of the Association for Moral Education, Krakow, Poland, 19 July 2003.

ISSN 0305-7240 print; ISSN 1465-3877 online/04/010003-20 2004 Journal of Moral Education LtdDOI: 10.1080/0305724042000200047

4 D. Boyd

I learned many things from Larry, far too many to acknowledge here. However,one thing I learned that informs my work still to this day is how the border betweenphilosophy and developmental psychology is important, but also permeable in animportant sense. Approaching issues in morality and moral education from thedirections of both disciplines and seeking a unified picture provides validity notfound from either perspective alone. I believe that my topic for this article is one thatwould benefit from an application of this lesson learned. However, for reasons ofspace I will be able to approach it solely from a philosophical perspective. If mycomments are deemed worthy of it, I hope that those who identify more aspsychologists will initiate complementary explorations from that direction as well.

Introduction

As humans and their relationships are remarkably complex, so also is moral edu-cation. If we think of moral education as addressing problems within humaninteraction, the range of kinds of such problems is obviously immense; so, of course,there will be weak spots, places where both theory and practice need strengthening.This article is about one of those. Moreover, as the kind of interaction that I havein mind constitutes a large proportion of the egregious harm that humans seem ableand prone to inflict on each other, this weak spot suggests a major shortcoming forwhich we need to become more accountable.

Examples are not hard to come by, as they are in the news on a regular basis. Theyvary in scope from the relatively localized to those almost global in pattern, but allare horrifying in their consequences for some people. To make this concrete, let meremind you of the following. Consider the contemporary conflicts between: theSinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka; the Protestants and Catholics in NorthernIreland; the Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East; the Karen and the Shan inBurma; the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda; the Serbs, Croats and Muslims in theformer Yugoslavia; the Hemas and Lendas in the Democratic Republic of Congo;the Indians and Pakistanis in Kashmir; the Europeans and the First Nations Peoplein Canada. And of course we can all think of historical examples that could be addedto this sobering list.

Most of us are acquainted with the fact of these tragedies of human conflict, someperhaps from personal experience. A few of us may have initiated studies in theircontext, at least after the fact (e.g. Garrod et al., 2003) but, in general, to ask whatmoral education today has to say about them produces very little by way ofsatisfactory answer. Because they seem so much outside our normal experience, formost of us they tend to remain outside what we theorize about in moral education.

Something very similar is, however, already extant in our own neighbourhoods,part of our everyday normal experience. Here I point less to relatively localized and(sometimes) temporally limited conflicts, and more to more generalized, enduring,structurally manifested patterns of harmful human interaction identified loosely bythe often-used labels of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexualism, etc. Thesemay not be as obvious and are seldom as newsworthy, but on a long-term basis theyare equally egregious as the more localized conflicts, if not more so. In fact, they are

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 5

causally related to them in some cases. Moreover, they are not so easily removedfrom our professional purview, because we are inside the conflict, whether we like itor not. However, as is the case with the more localized, limited conflicts I believethat, in general, the attention paid to these morally problematic patterns of humaninteraction within the contemporary field of moral education is weak, at best.

As a way of focusing my concerns in what follows I will concentrate on one ofthese patternsnamely, racismand how moral education might better deal with it.If one takes as representative of the field the articles published in the Journal of MoralEducation, it is striking that until fairly recently very little attention has been paid tothe problem of racism, and that attention more often than not has been marginal,more a hand-wave than a substantive coming-to-grips. In other major, recentpublications, even the hand-waves are rare (e.g. Damon, 2002). Of course, there aresome notable exceptions to this generalization, the best example being Larry Blums(1999) previous Kohlberg Memorial Lecture. However, I am concerned that even intheseand especially in the field more generallya crucial aspect of the problem isunder-theorized.

The question of human subjectivity

I am going to focus on one aspect of this weak spot, a particular theoretical aspectthat I think may be underpinning it in general. In short, I will be discussing thefundamental question of how we should think about human subjectivity. My reasonfor doing this is that I think much of any success in adequately addressing this weakspot depends on coming to grips with this question. It is, I believe, at the core ofwhat moral education must be about, even if it often remains hidden, or onlyimplicitly acknowledged, in both theory and practice. Moral education is inevitablyshaped and constrained by how subjectivity is conceived. By raising assumptionsabout subjectivity to the level of critical awareness we stand a better chance ofbecomng clearer about what we are doingand not doingin moral education.With this clarity, we also lessen the possibility that we will be blind to kinds of harmto which our approaches to moral education may be contributing, despite the factthat we like to think that anything rightfully called moral education must be good.

Talking about subjectivity is rife with dangers of being misunderstood: there aremyriad uses of this term in both philosophy and psychology. I want to be clear thatI am not thinking of subjectivity in its common usage as predicated of kinds ofstatements, claims or judgements in the sense they might be said to be subjectiveas opposed to objective. Nor, when I refer to the subject of moral education doI mean to refer to an area of study in schools. Rather, I am using subjectivity as ashorthand way of referring to what we think of as the core of what constitutes humanpersons, in an ideal, abstract sense. I understand human subjectivity to be a form ofself-awareness and sense of agency that is constituted by the interaction of embodiedpersons and their interpretations of that interaction. As essentially social animals, Ithink that it is arguable that humans, qua persons, do not really exist except insofar asthey see themselves related to each other, and that seeing is a cognitive achievement,at least to some extent. We are constituted by conceptions of how we relate to each

6 D. Boyd

other, and the shape that such relational-self-conceptions can take may be almostunlimited.1 Illuminating one way in which moral education might be constrained in itsunderlying conception of this kind of subjectivity is what I want to explore.

The context in which I am raising the question of how we should think of humansubjectivity is circumscribed by the kinds of serious problems identified earlier.Within this set there are, of course, significant differences among what I called thelocalized conflicts, differences among the more generalized patterns and differencesbetween the former and the latter. However, from one perspective at least they alsohave something in common, and it is this common factor that I believe contributessignificantly to their failure to show up adequately on the radar of moral educationattention. Although I ultimately part company with him in his treatment of racism,in his excellent and relevant book, Sharing Responsibility, Larry May (1992) hassuccinctly articulated this factor when he notes that:

action in the world is as much a function of groups as of individuals In advancedtechnological societies, much greater evil is done by groups of people than by discreteindividual people. (May, 1992, p. 53)

In short, it is from the perspective of groups and their impact on subjectivity that theseegregious moral problems need to be viewed. Throughout, I will take racism as anexample of what this might mean. My general concern is that the prevalent assump-tions about subjectivity in most contemporary moral education make it difficult, if notimpossible, to come to grips with the kinds of evil that May and I have in mind.

My aim is to try to make a case forto make theoretically more visible andplausiblea particular kind of human subjectivity that I think arises in the contextof social groups of a particular kind, the kind that seems to be entailed in theproblems noted earlier. My approach will be to work into this case by firstsynthesizing what I see as the dominant assumptions about subjectivity in the fieldtoday. These, I will argue, follow from a tendency to focus on all forms of socialinteraction through the lens of the discrete individual and, I think, a particularliberal interpretation of the idea of the discrete individual. To these I will thencontrast a group-embedded picture of subjectivity that I think we need to considerin addition. My argument will be that even though these two perspectives onsubjectivity are incompatible, paradoxically we need both if moral education is tospeak helpfully to the egregious problems noted.

A metaphorical and personal approach to the commonplace of individual-ism

In order to point effectively to an alternative way of thinking about subjectivity in thecontext of the kind of problems identified, I must first offer my synthesis of theprevailing assumptions about subjectivity. To make the need for this synthesis moreplausible, however, I will approach the task in this section metaphorically andpersonally. The reason for the metaphorical approach is that it gives me a way ofshining a spotlight on a view of subjectivity that is so commonplace, so ordinary inthe way most of us interpret our experience, as to escape notice as even being a

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 7

perspective at all, let alone a contestable one. The reason for the more personalcomments is to locate myself in reference both to this perspective and to my motivefor worrying about it. In doing this, I seek to avoid the appearance of finger pointing,a problem perhaps inherent in any serious attempt to come to grips with racism.

The metaphor

As noted earlier, I believe that the very nature of human people depends upon theircollective achievements in conceiving how they are essentially interrelated. In thisquintessentially human endeavour, entry into thinking about relations through afocus on the discrete individual has been hegemonic for centuries in the West. AsHeller et al. (1986) note:

Some form of individualismbroadly conceived as the view that the individualhuman subject is a maker of the world we inhabithas been a key factor in the life ofthe West for the last five hundred years. Modern definitions of the self and psychology,of ethical responsibility and civic identity, and of artistic representation and economicbehavior all rest on the notion of an individual whose experience and history, whosewill and values, whose expressions and preferences are essential constituents of reality.(Introduction, p. 1).2

As it is clearly built upon most of these definitions, moral education as we knowit today has been unavoidably shaped by this focus. In fact, I think we can be moreprecise about this. I suggest that a particular interpretation of this general adherenceto individualism, a particular perspective on subjectivity that I will refer to inshorthand as the idea of the liberal individual, shapes and delimits almost all ofcontemporary moral education theorizing. However, because it is so dominant, sotaken for granted, so transparent to our critical attention, approaching it metaphor-ically first may help us to see it better.

Although often threatened, the idea of the liberal individual has managed tosurvive throughout the last several centuries, repeatedly demonstrating remarkableself-protective, regenerative powers. One might very well think of it as the glasssnake of human self-conception. Let me explain this. Growing up on a Kansasfarm, and thus spending most of my childhood outside, led me to appreciate natureand, in particular, the number and variety of critters that inhabit it. Most of thesewere quite unremarkable and could be found at some time or other in my clutchesas a temporary pet. Bunnies, kittens, turtles, fish, lizards and even (once) a blackwidow spider fit the bill quite nicely. But one such critter escaped this attentiontheglass snake. This was a snake found only rarely, but one that presented quite aspectacle when found, at least by the always-present pet dog. Kansas farm dogs killsnakes, of course. Their method is to grab the snake with their jaws and shakevigorously until the snake appears to clearly embody the limpness of death; but inmy experience the glass snake almost always won this battle. The victory wasachieved not in the opossum-manner of faking the limpness of death in the hopesthat the canine short attention span would incline the dog to simply walk off invictory, and the opossum to also amble off somewhat later. Rather, the glass snakefaked death in a much more flamboyant manner: it visibly flew into numerous pieces

8 D. Boyd

as a result of the vigorous shaking by the dog. Now, even a dog knows that snakesdo not come in multiple pieces, at least while alive. Again, the dog walks off andeventually the boy as well. And the one essential piece of the glass snake, the one nottechnically classified as tail, the piece (although short) including all the vital organsand the head, crawls off to regenerate its whole self and live another day.

As a moral/political self-conception held by humans, the liberal individual surelymatches the glass snake in apparently miraculous powers. In many different prob-lematic environments it somehow manages to shed whatever is superfluous, justtail, and thus to avoid fatal, dogged critical attention. Sometimes it just crawls rightinto the thorny thicket of the practical problems of the real world to emerge wholeagain, supposedly as the only thing available to do the dirty work needed to solve themess. It has also been seen slithering into the dense bushes of bureaucratic incom-petence and inertia, to be discovered later quite healthily ensconced in the upperbranches disguised as an efficiency manager. Or, when necessary, it rolls down theslippery slope of moral complacency, but bounces back as a visionary leader. Andperhaps not so surprising, given its ideological origins, it often glorifies itself bysinking into the swamp of capitalistic greed and popping back up whole as justhuman nature. It can even lose itself in the dense forest of practical dilemmas facedby educators, only to metamorphose as a moral professional. Finally, and mostimportantly here, it can also surreptitiously wiggle into ones philosophical theoriz-ingeven when that theorizing is about problems that would seem to present anenvironment hostile to its flourishingand thus effectively constrict attention untilany vision of its conceptual competitors fades from view.

Now, there was a distinctively negative flavour to the metaphorical rhetoric that Ijust used to focus attention on the idea of the liberal individual and its remarkableregenerative powers. But, one might wonder, what is so wrong with thinking ofpeople, oneself and others, by focusing on subjectivity from the perspective of thediscrete individual? Surely, if this is what has enabled major liberal thinkers (such asRousseau, Wollstonecraft and Kant earlier and Rawls, Gutmann and our ownKohlberg recently) to see praiseworthy human interaction in terms of the loftynotions of autonomy, equality, human dignity, respect for persons and justice, etc. wehave some really substantial prima facie reasons for accepting it and, if so, we mightalso seem to have very good grounds for anchoring moral education in this way.

As a result of my parental upbringing and subsequent education, this perspectivecertainly feels right to me much of the time. The glass snake of the liberalindividual is coiled, almost unseen, at the conceptual centre of much of my earlierwork (e.g. Boyd, 1980, 1984; Kohlberg et al., 1990). I believe that this is also truefor much of contemporary moral education today, at least as it surfaces in Englishpublications. However, I want to acknowledge that the analysis that I will present iscircumscribed by my own location in a primarily North American milieu, in termsof history, social conditions and academic orientation. The Association for MoralEducation has become increasingly international and multicultural over the lastseveral years and, I am convinced, healthier thereby. However, whether the liberallegacies as I read them are as salient to many in this audience here in Krakow mustremain a seriously open question. Moreover, it is certainly the case that my

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 9

motivation for beginning to question my own adherence to them has sprung frommy particular location and history that is specific to North America.

One example will have to suffice here. I was dismayed a few years ago, evenmorally shaken, to learn from reading a paper by Charles Mills (1994) that in ATheory of Justice John Rawls (1971) mentions only the slavery of antiquity, andsimply ignoresin a book about justice in reasonably developed democratic soci-etiesthe particular and horrendous fact of slavery in the USA. But what disturbedme even more, because it more clearly put the ball in my court rather than Rawls,is that I had missed this fact, despite having studied the book twice in courses withhim at Harvard before it was published and having used it subsequently in my workfor the next 30 years. I began to wonder about the connection between this morallysuspicious ignorance and my commitment to focusing on social reality and subjec-tivity through the lens of the discrete individual, and I began to think and writeabout how I might see human subjectivity differently if I tried on a different lens.3

Vital characteristics of the glass snake of liberal individual subjectivity andthe kind of moral work they enable

Characteristics

So what is the piece that survives so resiliently as the core of this idea of how we arerelated to each other as social animals, liberalisms legacy concerning a perspectiveon subjectivity? I submit that in most varieties of liberalism4 the vital life force of theidea of the liberal individual can be synthesized in terms of four characteristics ofsubjectivity. Although there may be more, at least it is these that have had the mostinfluence on contemporary moral education. It is from the perspective of thesecharacteristics and how they work together that the subjectivity that we attend toand seek to mould through moral education comes into purview. It is these glasssnake characteristics of the subject of moral education that I think need questioningif moral education is to address adequately the kinds of problems of human conflictthat I noted earlier.

The four characteristics that I will explicate briefly are the following: (1) ontolog-ical uniqueness, (2) symmetrical positioning, (3) intentional rational agency and (4)capacity for transcendence. I recognize that any one of these might be found inanother tradition, but it is the combination of them that I want to focus on as a legacyof liberalism, the coherent idea as a whole that thrives so well. It is their integrationthat enables particular, important moral work to be conducted, as I will shortlyidentify.

(1) Ontological uniqueness. I submit that the heart of liberalisms legacy in moraleducation is the conception of individual embodied persons as ontologically uniquecentres of consciousness and experience. By ontologically unique I do not meananything particularly esoteric, and certainly not anything prior to, or removed from,social reality. Rather, I just mean that from this perspective the boundaries of personsdo not overlap in their interactions and individuals are never in any fundamental way

10 D. Boyd

the same or indistinguishable. Everybody is unique is not just a shibboleth, it isreality from this perspective. We apparently have the authority of science to back upthis belief: nobody is the same as anyone else in fingerprints, voiceprints, retinalpatterns and, especially, that granddaddy of all uniqueness determinants, DNA. Theuniqueness of individualized personal subjectivity is considered to be as firmlyestablished, as ontologically sound and as equally uncontestable as these empiricalfacts.

(2) Symmetrical positioning. A second characteristic of this perspective on subjectivitypositions all instances symmetrically with all others. Despite the variation entailed byembodied uniqueness, in principle all are on a level playing field, none higher orlower on some scale of subjective importance, but equal. As a result, recognition ofdifference is neutral: it can be articulated in the same mirror image terms from anyposition. The relational structure of liberal subjectivity is the same for everyone,regardless of how they are positioned in actual society.

(3) Intentional rational agency. Third, individuals so positioned share the same kindof agentic potential. From this kind of perspective, socially recognizable action canbe predicated only of individual subjective locations and only in so far as they engagein intentional behaviour to effect some desired state in the world. Moreover, boththis desired state and the behavioural means used to effect it are in principle opento rational evaluation. Without these capacities as exercised by discrete individuals,action in the social world does not exist. Differences in actual subject locations are,in the end, attributable to the choices of desired states made by individuals over timeand the relative success in effecting them. Rational choice and intentional agency arethe muscles that enable this glass snake to move through the world and to changeit.

(4) Capacity for transcendence. Finally, the horizons of possible change for thisindividualized agency are quite open, both internally and externally. Another way ofsaying this is that the capacity for transcendence results from the exercise of themuscles of rational choice and intentionality. The striving for autonomy is theinternal expression of this capacity, although not thereby necessarily a cause ofseparation or forced independence. This aspect of the capacity is undoubtedlycomfortably familiar to most contemporary developmental psychologists. Develop-ment is not just any change, but change in some internal patterns of psychologicalorganization, each step of which is an improvement on previous patterns manifestedwithin the organism, in the direction of increasing adequacy in, and degrees offreedom for, making sense of perceived environment. However, the external exerciseof this capacity is, for my purposes, perhaps more important. This sense consists ofwhat autonomy is thought to be able to accomplish in terms of overcoming externalconstraints. In this context it entails the possibility of standing outside of any existingsocial contingencies for the purpose of altering them in some desired direction.5 Inthis sense, anyone possessing liberal subjectivitywhich is everyone, in principlehas at least some degree of social freedom: through judicious, critical application of

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 11

the powers of choosing not to go along with any social constraint and intentionallyacting in some way to effect this choice, the social world can be reshaped.

Moral work

I hope this synthesis is not too far off the mark, that despite its abstract qualities youcan recognize yourselves and the grounding of your approach to moral education inthis interpretation of subjectivity. Certainly I do, at least in some circumstances andfor some kinds of problems. It is very important to me, and to appropriateappreciation of what I am trying to do in the following sections, that you understandthat I do not want to throw all of this out the conceptual window, willy-nilly. Thelegacies of liberalism, as located in this synthesis of subjectivity, have been, and willcontinue to be, of considerable value in moral education, even for some aspects ofthe kind of problems that I identified earlier. To make this concrete, I want toidentify briefly some of the very important moral work that is made possible by thisperspective on human subjectivity.

First, failing to accept the assumption of ontological uniqueness would seeminglyamount to cutting the heart out of moral education as we know it today. At leastsince Kant, the belief that each and everyone of us is a person is his/her own rightpumps the circulation of basic, inviolable respect that is the lifeblood of liberalmorality and moral education. Taking seriously the categorical imperative in its formof treating others always as ends and never solely as means puts important con-straints not only on the interaction of adults but also on any grand moral educationscheme that would seek to use the next generation as tools to bring about someimagined future, perfect society. Then, one way this constraint does its work isthrough the characteristic of symmetrical positioning. Because all individuals areassumed to be symmetrically positioned with regard to each other, the perspectivesof self and other (all others) are reversible and ideal reciprocity can be expected.Walking in the shoes of another may be contingently difficult but not, in principle,impossible and we strive to teach children how to develop the capacity anddisposition to do exactly this, regardless who the other is, through moral education.However, that capacity and disposition cannot be developed without attention to themoral agentic muscles of rational choice and intentionality. Respect for persons restsconceptually upon intentional efforts of individuals to identify ways of acting towardothers that are freely chosen and rationally evaluated in terms of being acceptablefrom the perspective of all parties involved. Finally, the possibility of moral progressflows directly from the capacity for transcendence. Through recognition of thiscapacity, as it is shaped by the first three characteristics, we acknowledge thepossibility and need to stand outside of our current social circumstances in order toimagine how they might be changed for the better. We seek to build moral educationprogrammes that enable the next generation to accept what we pass on to them thatis good, and to construct something better when they deem necessary.

Ah, what a pretty picture of morality and moral education! An ideal, to be sure,one often identified by its absence more than its actualisation, but surely somethingworth hanging on to as a legacy of liberalism; and I do want to hang on to it. At the

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same time, I want to argue with equal strength that that is not the entire picture. Thispicture is only one perspective on the social world, one well-established way thathumans have developed to interpret themselves in relationship, one kind of subjec-tivity. What I want to show now is how this perspective is quite different from theone that we need for a full account of the kind of problems that I started with, andof racism in particular.

Racism as mob-like activity

As a first stepthe most crucial steptoward identifying this difference, I think itmust be recognized that some kinds of harmful relations in the social world are notprimarily between or among individuals, when persons are conceived in the mannerjust described. Racism is one example. In such cases, the social entity that comes tothe forefront is a particular kind of group and a relationship of oppression.

Now, it has been my experience, both self-referentially and in observation ofothers, that talk of oppression makes the liberal individual in people squirmmentally and morally. There is a tendency to respond to it as rhetoric that is just toomuch over the top, inflated, sensational and, thus, ultimately self-defeating in thecontext of understanding and critiquing racism because it merely provokes reactionsof resistance. Why is it necessary, so it is thought, when what we need to do is to seeall people of whatever colour as equals and worthy of the same respect? Surely all thetools that are needed to address racism adequately can be found in the assumptionsabout the liberal individual noted earlier, together with careful application of themoral norms that have been developed within this tradition of working from thisperspective on subjectivity. Well, no. Or at least I think we should have seriousdoubts, doubts that worry me personally.

These doubts are raised by a particular understanding of what we are talkingabout in referring to racism. Let me explain. First of all, it is crucial to see thatracism is not an unfortunate, emergent accident of the natural fact of differentraces in the world. In fact, biological race is simply not in the world: it is no longerthought to have any empirical validity as a meaningful way to differentiate humans.6

On the other hand, race as racism certainly is in the world as a way that humanshave developed to see each other as socially related. As McLaren and Torres(1999) argue:

it is essential for scholars to understand that the construction of the idea of race isembodied in racist ideology that supports the practice of racism. It is racism as anideology that produces the notion of race, not the existence of races that producesracisms. (p. 47)

Moreover, and equally important, this particular ideological way of seeing otherscannot be understood adequately as involving only discrete individuals in relation, forexample, in the form of morally inappropriate attitudes of racial prejudice. Instead,what we gain by oppression talk is the perspective of social groups and attentionto a kind of interaction between such groups. In what follows I find myself inagreement with a number of contemporary scholars (e.g. Young, 1990; Alcoff, 1996;

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 13

Cudd, 2001; Gould, 2001) who argue that groups do indeed have a kind of (social)ontological status. I will depend heavily upon the analysis provided by Iris MarionYoung (1990) in Justice and the Politics of Difference, as it is the clearest that I knowof (and it has personally helped me understand my own location in the problem ofracism).

From this point of view, it is in so far as individuals are identified as members of suchgroupsand located in a particular group in relation to anotherthat they can besaid to be oppressed, i.e. to suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop andexercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings (Young,1990, p. 40). This interpretation moves us away from the common understanding ofoppression as necessarily involving the coercion of a tyrannical power and towardstructural and systemic concerns:

Oppression in this sense is structural, rather than the result of a few peoples choicesor policies. Its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in theassumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of followingthose rules. It names, as Marilyn Frye puts it, an enclosing structure of forces andbarriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category ofpeople (Young, 1990, p. 41).

The full harms of racism as oppression, understood in this sense, then come intoview only when groups are seen to be defined in relation to each other and this relationis systemically manifested through structures of unequal power. (From now on,when I speak of groups or social groups it is only this kind of collectivity that Ihave in mind.) In contrast, I submit that the perspective provided by focusing on thediscrete individual, even one so morally privileged as the ideal liberal individual,simply cannot accommodate oppression talk in this sense.

In order to draw this contrast as clearly as possible, I must now introduce anothermetaphor (to give the glass snake some real competition), and a rather harsh oneat that. In short, I find it hard to come to grips with the insidious nature of racismunless I begin to think of the social groups that are so related as mobs. Correspond-ingly, I think it is crucial to also struggle with the idea that in so far as persons areracialized in their interactions with others, they need to be conceived qua memberof a group in terms of something like mob membership. From this perspective theglass snake of the liberal individual cannot be found. It is simply not the functionalway of seeing subjectivity in this context.

Now, why mob? Is it just a metaphor that we could dispense with? I think theanswer to this question is that we should not reject it at least until we have exploredit in some depth. Certainly it does some important work immediately via what itconnotes to most people. First, mobs are usually associated with something nega-tive, often horrifyingly so, such as a lynching. Then they also seem to take on a lifeof their own, as if they have a will. Further, individuals in a mob are said to lose theiridentity and their capacity to act on their own. Although the actions of the mob arecarried out through the behaviour of individuals, the will of the mob does not seemreducible to the aggregate of the intentions of discrete individual members. Finally,it seems difficult to apply our everyday notions of individual responsibility to the

14 D. Boyd

actions of a mob. What we pick up, then, in beginning to think of racializedindividuals in terms of mob membership is a perspective that I think is morecongruent with the reality of racism as oppression. We also gain a perspective thatpresents a vivid contrast to liberalism, in particular to how it sees embodiedpersons and their interaction in the social world.7

Thinking of social groupssuch as racialized groupsas mobs presents a difficultchallenge to liberalism. Much of this challenge boils down to its threat to howindividuals are conceived in relation to a group. Within liberalism, for all kinds ofrecognizable groups, the individual is ontologically prior to the collectivity. Thecollectivity is possible only if individuals exist first. However, in the case of socialgroup membership the group is ontologically prior to the individual: it constitutesindividuals qua members of the groups. From the perspective of social groups,embodied persons are ontologically embedded in pre-existing relationships (andalways in several at the same time), and thus need to be understood as having a kindof subjectivity quite different from the idea of the liberal individual.

The subjectivity of (oppressive) group membership

As someone raised masculine, white, middle-class, heterosexual and liberally edu-cated to the level of a doctorate, the liberal individual resides at the core of mysubjectivity as easily as the glass snake in dog-less knee-high grass. It usually feels athome to me, or it, in me. But I worry that I am also something quite different asa particular embodied instance of my membership in the social groups to whichthese social location descriptors point.

So, here is the question. What are people when they are considered as membersof social groups? How should we think of them? What kind of discourse bestcaptures all aspects of what it means for someone to be seen, whatever else may betrue of them, qua social group member? Do we have any reason to think, other thanour prima facie commitment to the assumptions about ourselves as (in principle)liberal individuals, that that-which-is-a-member-of-a-social-group is the same kindof subjectivity as what one finds in the make-up of other kinds of collectivities? Myaim in what follows is to articulate what I think group-embedded subjectivity lookslike. To make this as clear as possible, I will do this in terms of distinct contrasts tothe four essential characteristics of the liberal individual outlined earlier, noting ineach case how mob-like the resulting picture is. However, I must note first that thecontrast comes into view clearly only when the order of these characteristics ischangedbecause what matters in the world is changed.

Collective practice embeddedness

Forms of oppression such as racism are not unrelated, episodic behavioural patternsof discrete individuals considered as autonomous agents. Instead, they need to beseen as collective practices or projects8 that historically produce, and are repro-duced by, a particular form of subjectivity. When mobs form, they do not do so asan accident of the similarity between the occasional behaviours of individuals (as an

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 15

aggregate interpretation might have it). Nor is there a clear purpose based in theintentions of individuals before they become mob members (as an associativeinterpretation would assume). In contrast, mobs are manifested through the sharingof patterns of action by members, by collective practice. Moreover, although mobsthemselves probably cannot be said to have intentions,9 the collective practice of themob certainly supercedes the intentions of individuals. It does this by inserting intoindividuals actions a collective aim, an insertion so powerful that it can eveneffectively override the counter intentions that individuals might have had beforebecoming a member. In fact, this insertion is partly constitutive of that becoming.

Mobs exist through what they seek to achieve in the world. I believe thatracialized groups take exactly this form. As I have already noted, race does notdescribe any empirical fact about the world. Seeing others through this concept onlymasquerades as a factual claim. Instead, the use of the notion itselfthe shaping ofour subjectivities as group membersis an illocutionary practice. As Goldberg(1993) has argued so persuasively:

The minimal significance race bears itself does not concern biological but naturalizedgroup relations. Race serves to naturalize the groupings it identifies in its own nameIts meaning, as its forces, are always illocutionary. In using race and the terms bearingracial significance, social subjects racialize the people and population groups whomthey characterize and to whom they refer. (p. 81)

From this perspective, individuals do not and cannot transcend their social groupembeddednesat least this kindwith the ease of the liberal individual. Rather,they are formed by it in relation to others deemed as other via a shared illocutionarypractice that, in turn, shapes behaviour in the world. Mobs, of course, are relativelyshort-lived. Racialized groups, however, are defined much more as historicalprojects. They are both the result of shared patterns of practice by group membersover significant blocks of time and the structures that enable and constrain sub-sequent shared practice. They certainly appear and disappear in particularconfigurations over time but they are also far more stable than mobs, having muchbroader and deeper effects on the lives of their members. The performance of aracialized relationship constitutes a form of subjectivity that is quite the opposite ofthe capacity for transcendence that accrues to the liberal individual. It is a kind ofembeddedness in an historical practice of relational naming that constitutes personsin relation to others through this very naming.

Hierarchical difference

The kind of subjectivity that is constituted through the embeddedness in anhistorical practice of racialization cannot be found on the level playing field ofdiscrete, symmetrically positioned individuals. Rather, it flows from the fact of howracialized groups are formed in terms of hierarchical difference that is relationallydefined. As Young says in referring to this special kind of group, Groups are anexpression of social relations; a group exists only in relation to at least one othergroup (Young, 1990, p. 43). What this means is that a social group does not have

16 D. Boyd

ontological status on its own, nor do its individualized members. Rather, it mustalways and necessarily be understood in terms of some other social group thatconstitutes a Difference. One finds oneself in some particular social group as andinsofar as one finds the other in a particular contrasting social group. For example,I am white insofar as others are deemed to be black (and other colours).(Further, I am masculine insofar as others are deemed to be feminine; I amheterosexual insofar as others are deemed to be gay/lesbian, etc.) In every case,the others social group identification depends on the reciprocal relationship.

This is not, however, a reciprocity of equality. On the contrary, the relationalitythat characterizes social groups in this sense is that of one groups systemicdominance over another as a relatively stable, although historically fluctuating, fact.This dominance is effected in many different forms, forms that work together for themaintenance of unequal power. In some forms, the more visible and often acknowl-edged, this amounts to the kinds of power over that one group (and its members)has relative to another group (and its members). These are the forms that show upin statistics about who controls the political institutions, the police forces andarmies, the wealth, the access to education and job opportunities, etc. Other formsof dominance are more subtle in mechanism, but no less an expression and meansof maintaining unequal power. In these cases, the relationship is located more in thepower to of one group relative the other, in essence the power to determine thecategories, norms and evaluation of the ways people determine meaning and interactwith each other in social discourse around that meaning.10 From this perspective, theplaying field is decidedly not level (as it is for the liberal individual) but higher forsome subject positions than for others because of this relationship. Difference is notneutral, but defined for the benefit of some at the expense of others. This kind ofdifference cannot be simply shed like the glass snake liberal individuals success intranscending social influences. Nor can the subject so formed walk in the othersshoes. Instead, as Young shows convincingly, it is ontologically impossible forpeople in one social position to adopt the perspective of those in the social positionswith which they are related in social structures and interaction (Young, 1997,p. 44).

Fungibility

As the heart of liberal subjectivity is located in the characteristic of ontologicaluniqueness, that of embodied group membership, in contrast, is located in thefungibility of group members qua members. The core meaning of fungible is thatsingular instances of some substance are interchangeable. Fungible is a term usedmost commonly in law, especially with regard to economic exchange. In that contextit means not only interchangeable, but interchangeable in the satisfaction of anobligation. Examples would be grains of wheat or barrels of oil that are being boughtor sold. As long as they are of the same quality, the grains are interchangeable withany other grains and the barrels are interchangeable with any other barrels in thefulfilment of a contract. It does not matter which ones are exchanged because theyare deemed to be fungible. In the context in which I am using the term there is not,

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 17

strictly speaking, an obligation to be satisfied. However, there is a kind of bindingquality that is functionally equivalent. On the dominant side of the relationshipbetween two groups it amounts to the pressure to pull ones weight in the collectiveproject of oppression, to at least appear to act in such a way as to not undulythreaten the norms, habits and symbols through which dominant solidarity ismaintained. On the subjugated side, it takes the form of mutual recognition ofothers similarly located as united in vulnerability, double consciousness andresistance. The subjectivity of members of social groups depends upon the strengthof their performative fungibility.

As already noted, the kind of relationship that can be called oppressive involvesdeeply embedded and significant kinds of inequality of power adhering tosocial groups defined relative to each other. It is important to understand thatI am using a particular sense of power here, one that I take primarily fromThomas Wartenbergs (1992) social field analysis of power. Wartenbergargues that an adequate picture of power is one that that does not just focuson particular, discrete individuals that are interacting in some identified socialcontext, for example a teacher and student in a classroom. Instead, toappreciate fully what can be done and what not, we must understand the role ofperipheral social agents that constitute the social field within which, and in termsof which, the individuals are enabled or constrained to effect specific actions andreactions.

The situated conception of power replaces a model that treats power as an agentspossession by a model of the social field It asserts that many relationships of socialpower are constituted in the first instance by the way in which peripheral social agentstreat both the dominant and the subordinate agents. (Wartenberg, 1992, p. 87)

These peripheral social agents play an active role in supporting a particular patternof interaction, a particular practice, through their alignment with each other andwith the actors. This perspective on power and the role of alignment in it explainshow individuals come to have a social being that transcends their own individualexperience. (Wartenberg, 1992, p. 96)

In the way I am using this analysis, one can then see that both our experience ofthe social world and our interactions within it are already aligned for us in so faras we are constituted as members of social groups. The social being that transcendsparticular experience viewed from the point of view of embodied instances of socialgroups is itself the same for every member, in so far as they are aligned with eachother considered qua member. As I noted earlier, individuals tend to lose them-selves in a mob. I believe this perception of what happens to people is accurate fromthe point of view of the liberal individual when they are seen as embedded in socialgroups. That kind of subjectivity fades ontologically as mob membership grows instrength because particular instances are fungible. Starting from within somethinglike a mob, I/we recognize, and relationally interact with, those other others assomething like an opposing mob. In short, I am unavoidably part of something thatis doing something in me, for me, through me, as me.

18 D. Boyd

Proxy agency

As I described it earlier, the subjectivity of the liberal individual works inandonthe world through its essential muscles of rational choice and intentionality; butthese muscles of social action function only when predicated of centres of conscious-ness and experience that are ontologically unique. The fungibility of social groupmembers enables a kind of agency that is fundamentally different, what I call proxyagency. In contrast to individualized liberal agency, mob members act througheach other and as each other. A proxy is a person authorized to act for another. Theexistence of a mob rests directly on this kind of reciprocal authorization amongmembers with regard to achieving its ends. Any given member need not perform aparticular act for it to be undertaken in his/her name, as his/her agent. Evenstronger, it is their unavoidable action by proxy that is partly constitutive of this kindof subjectivity because the authorization is itself largely independent of the inten-tions of particular members of the social group.

Understood as oppression, racism thrives on this kind of action by proxy on thepart of racialized group members. As manifested on the dominant side of the grouprelationality there are myriad forms of this action by proxy, and they are allinterconnected to form the structure of oppression. Some of it takes the form ofovert acts of control and violence. When white police stop young black drivers whileignoring the same infractions committed by white drivers, they are stand-ins foranyone qua white. When they react with violent rage to a suspects resistance andthis reaction is differentially related to the skin colour of the suspect, they are actingfor all white masters in a practice deeply embedded in the history of slavery inNorth America. Most black people understand this action by proxy in cases such asthe Rodney King beating, whereas relatively few whites do. The former depend onthis awareness for survival and health on a daily basis; the latter express theirprivilege by being able to be oblivious to it. Other forms of action by proxy are moresymbolic and semiotic. These range from the one-drop blood rule for determiningwho qualifies as white to media images of black youth, especially men, as criminals.Again, in all such cases these actions work performatively to position any persondeemed white in a position of relative privilege (although I hasten to add that thiswill vary in accordance with other social location facts about the person, such asclass and gender). Finally, yet other forms permeate much of educational practice.These range from the predominance of whites in the profession of teaching to theimpact of literary and philosophical canons limited primarily to the works of deadwhite males. These instances are perhaps the most worrisome because the proxy isbeing acted on in the name of the next generation by the very peopleeducatorswho are in the role of enabling that generation to conceptualize how they want tointeract as persons. Since we as moral educators are at the heart of this endeavour,our failure to take seriously this aspect of this alternative perspective on subjectivityis morally very dangerous.

Concluding comments

Throughout this article I have focused my argument on perspectives, in particular

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 19

on two perspectives that might be taken on subjectivity. My motive for doing so hasbeen to trouble our too comfortable dependence within moral education on what Ihave synthesized as the kinds of assumptions about subjectivity that are legacies ofliberalism. The rationale for this critique I find in the uncontestable existence ofpatterns of egregiously harmful interactions of humans in the world around us thatare arguably more about certain kinds of social groups and their oppressive relationsthan about discrete individuals. Using racism as an example, I have sought toportray these two perspectives as not just different, but fundamentally incompatible.One perspective blocks what can be seen from the other, and vice versa. My pursuitof this theoretical analysis has been motivated by my worry that an attempt to viewthis kind of problem through the lens of the idea of the liberal individual is toolimiting, a potentially dangerous constriction of moral vision. To make this analysismore vivid I introduced the metaphors of the liberal individual as glass snake andsocial groups as mobs.

Now, in conclusion, I want to take a meta-perspective on what I think may havebeen accomplished, to clarify where I think we are left if we accept the analysis andargument. I am sure most of you are familiar with the perspectival paradoxes that arepresented by pictures that have two figures in them, only one of which can be seenat one time. One common example is the picture of the duck and rabbit heads. Ifyou see the duck the rabbit vanishes; if, on the other hand, you see the rabbit theduck disappears. (I have also learned that some people have extreme difficulty seeingthe second figure after the initial experience of identifying the first.) I think it ishelpful to think of the contrast that I have drawn as a conceptual version of this kindof perspectival paradox. If one views the problem of racism from the perspective ofthe liberal individual, one cannot see the problem in terms of social group relations,as oppression. On the other hand, if one views the problem from the beginning asone of oppressive relations between social groups, the liberal individual seems todisappear.

The difference between the two examples of paradoxes is significant, however.Unless one has some kind of weird duck or rabbit fetish, it really does not matterwhich is seen; nor does it really matter if a person cannot make the switch and seeboth at different times. However, I submit that any fully adequate approach toaddressing the kind of problems that I have focused on requires assuming theperspective of both kinds of subjectivitythat of the liberal individual and thatformed through the relations of social groups.

If this is the case, then I think we are left with a genuine meta-dilemma ofperspective. In many circumstances that involve racism, for example, we may needto utilize both, but cannot do so at the same time. Moreover, utilizing only one willhave dangerous consequences from the other perspective. Assuming that the subjec-tivity that is operative is what we find in the liberal individual seems to give usneeded leverage to change things such as racial oppression but, at the same time, sodoing occludes recognition of the existing structural features of group-based op-pression and the kind of subjectivity that it thrives upon. On the other hand,assuming the latter enables acceptance of the impossibility of a racially neutralposition, given the reality of contemporary society, but at the same time seems to

20 D. Boyd

undermine hope because the only viable model of agency and responsibility that wehave is that accruing to the idea of the liberal individual.

However, to this picture I want to add a strong caveat. I think we should becareful not to slip into thinking that the perspective of the liberal individual is thedefault position, one that we can always fall back upon. That is, thinking that thedilemma can be solved, in the sense that it goes away, through an individualsrational choice to use which perspective in any given context is, I think, to fail toappreciate its full power. It is to lose sight of the fact that some kinds of subjectivitydo not work that way in the real world. The glass snake has managed to regenerateitself once again and constrict our attention away from the problem.

I believe that this is a genuine dilemma, one that we must face with considerableintellectual and moral courage and with creative thinking. If moral education todayis ever to seem more adequate in the context of the kind of problems that focus myattention in this article, that success, I submit, will depend on facing and seeing ourway through this dilemma. I trust that you share my concern about the kinds ofconflicts I identified at the beginning of this article, and about the pernicious effectsof racism in particular. If I am correct in my argument about the kind of subjectivityinvolved, then I hope you will agree with me that the legacies of liberalism are notan adequate basis on which moral education can be grounded to address suchproblems. If we do not explore something like the alternative perspective that Idescribe, then we may be actually supporting the status quo. In my judgement, in thisregard the status quo is morally unacceptable to any moral education that deservesour support.

Notes

1. Although this claim may raise the realist hackles on some, and I must just stipulate it here,some version of it would find solid support in the work of an array of prominentcontemporary philosophers, from Foucault to Harre to Hacking. In terms of my under-standing of it, Hacking perhaps says it best when he identifies with the position that helabels dynamic nominalism, that numerous kinds of human beings and human acts comeinto being hand in hand with our invention of the categories labelling them (Hacking,1986, p. 236).

2. I use the characterization hegemonic advisedly here, as they also correctly acknowledgethat, although arguably still dominant, this focus has also been challenged from a numberof directions from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the present (p. 1).

3. Of course I was aware of the alternative lens provided by some forms of communitarianism,such as that offered by MacIntyre (1981, 1988), but in the context of the kind of systemicproblem such as racism that I was worried about I felt that it was even more suspect, as itcan easily provide apparent justification for traditional practices that are instances of theproblem.

4. I am well aware that historically there have been, and even currently still are, many varietiesof views that characterize themselves as, or are called by critics, liberalism. Perhaps someof them do not depend on the core assumptions that I seek to illuminate here. If so, it isthus possible that my critique that follows does not apply to these interpretations. However,there should be no doubt that some of the most prominent varieties of liberalism do indeedcontain these assumptions, although there might be legitimate intrafamilial quibbles abouthow they are best articulated.

The legacies of liberalism and oppressive relations 21

5. As Heller et al. (1986) note, the early social contract theorists (arguably at the heart of theliberal tradition) recognized that:

Man [sic] had to rise above his life history in order to achieve the dispassionate exercise ofreason that full autonomy required. Kants solution to this dilemma, the transcendent figureof the subject as a nonindividuated potential for self-actualization, still appears repeatedlyin our most enshrined collective practices. Its current manifestations include the welfare-defining maximizer in economics, the democratic voter in politics, the socially mobile roleselector in functionalist sociology, and the maturing moral actor in developmental psy-chology. Despite the criticisms that have been directed at the ontological grounding and thepolitical consequences of this individualist imagery, it continues to prevail in institutional-ized culture. (pp. 56)

6. This claim is now a commonplace within critical race studies literature. For the besttheoretical account of its grounding that I know of see David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture(Oxford, Blackwell, 1993). One startling, relevant empirical finding that has emerged fromthe Genome Project is that The concept of race has no basis in the genetic history ofhuman beings [because] we are all 99.9 percent identical (Mary Claire-King, as quoted byEve Nichols in Discussion of Genomes Societal Impacts, at www.wi.mit.edu/news/genome/media.html).

7. The same claim might be made for any kind of oppression, although I would want to beopen to how the account might need modification.

8. In my use and understanding of this notion I am following Connells brilliant analysis ofgender. See R. W. Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1987),215ff.

9. I am not aware of any work addressing this question directly. If it does not exist, I wouldsuggest that one reasonat least until it proves to be a dead endlies in the hegemonicinfluence of liberalism once again. In this case, the liberal individual usurps all accountsof agency through the tight connection between individual intentions and all action in theworld.

10. For a more in-depth analysis of how these forms of dominance differ, together witha more nuanced account of the means and results of the dominance of meaning,see Barbara Applebaum and Dwight Boyd (2000) The meaning of dominance, thedominance of meaning, and the morality of the matter, in M. Leicester, C. Modgil & S.Modgil (Eds) Education, culture and valuesvolume iv: moral education and pluralism (Lon-don, Falmer).

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