Who’s to Blame? Hermeneutical Misfire, Forward-Looking Responsibility, and Collective Accountability

ABSTRACT

The main aim of this paper is to investigate how sexist ideology distorts our conceptions of sexual violence and the hermeneutical gaps such an ideology yields. I propose that we can understand the problematic issue of hermeneutical gaps about sexual violence with the help of Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice. By distinguishing between hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical misfire, we can distinguish between the hermeneutical gap and its consequences for the victim of sexual violence and those of the perpetrator of such violence. I then argue that perpetrators are both morally responsible and accountable for their acts, even if they are the result of a hermeneutical misfire. Ultimately, I show that with regard to sexual violence, we should opt for accountability to change the behaviour of the perpetrator and the social structure. Content warning: The paper discusses sexual violence and difficulties conceptualising experiences of such violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexist ideology
• hermeneutical injustice
• hermeneutical misfire
• blame
• moral responsibility
• accountability

Acknowledgments

I am deeply thankful to Melanie Altanian and all the participants of the ‘Epistemic Injustice in the Aftermath of Collective Wrongdoing’ workshop that took place in December 2019 in Bern. Furthermore, I want to thank Seunghyun Song and Natalie Ashton, a then anonymous reviewer, for their helpful comments that urged me to think more thoroughly about some of the claims in the paper. I also want to thank Jenny Saul and the participants of the Sheffield Writing Workshop in 2016 for feedback on a very early (and utterly different) draft of this paper. Additionally, I’d like to thank Mari Mikkola for helping to coin the term ‘hermeneutical misfire’ and (as always) valuable feedback on early ideas that finally led to this paper. Finally, as always, I am grateful to Jacob Blumenfeld for discussion and help with the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Rape myths are ‘inaccurate perceptions concerning rape’ (Jenkins 2016, 2) and include, for example, the myth that rape is only committed by strangers or that rape always involves aggravated physical force and that victims always resist their attacker. See Hänel 2018, chapter 1 for a detailed explanation.

2. See also Peterson and Muehlenhard (2011), Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that coming to terms with one’s traumatic memory is a long process; sometimes it can take years for victims to label the given experience one of rape (cf. Littleton and Grills-Taquechel 2011; Artime, McCallum, and Peterson 2014; Harned 2005; Wilson and Miller 2016). Alcoff (2018) provides a thorough account of this.

3. It is hard to feel any sympathy with a perpetrator of sexual violence even when they suffered from hermeneutical misfiring, by which I mean a gap in the collective resource that cannot be overcome (for example, due to social privileges). And it is good that our feeling of sympathy is not easily forthcoming. We should hold on to the anger we instead feel towards perpetrators of sexual violence. However, part of the reason why our sympathy is not forthcoming is because we often think of cases of physically violent forms of rape when hearing the term ‘sexual violence’. Indeed, it happens on a regular basis that other acts of sexual violence are not even seen as sexual violence. And in these other and less aggravated cases, sympathy or himpathy (Manne 2018) for the violator is quite common and often involves questioning the innocence of the victim and whether the act in question really was an act of sexual violence. In other words, it is not because we want to excuse the behaviour of violators that we should engage with extremely hard questions of ideological distortion, responsibility, and blameworthiness, but because we have to confront a social reality in which most acts of sexual violence are not acknowledged as sexual violence.

4. In a different paper, I show how the testimonial and hermeneutical injustice that victims of sexual violence often experience can lead to further losses and hinder victim’s self-development and self-recognition (Hänel 2020).

5. Others have pointed out that Fricker is mistaken in assuming something like a collective hermeneutical resource and that this notion obscures the ways in which marginalised and oppressed social groups have their own concepts with which to understand and articulate their experiences. (cf. Medina 2012; Mason 2011) Although it is crucial to point to the very diverse ways in which members of marginalised groups contribute to hermeneutical resources and in which privileged groups are ignorant of already existing concepts, what is important for the content of the paper is the idea that there is a dominant resource that influences our lives. Think about rape myths and the way we take them on board or critically position ourselves against them – either way, they influence our behaviour, our experiences, and our possibilities to understand and articulate both.

6. I say more about epistemic and wilful ignorance below.

7. I will come to this in the next section as it seems far from obvious to me that they are.

8. I develop a detailed account of the difference between hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical misfire along these lines in a different paper.

9. Bird (2002) has critiqued this view, arguing that uptake is not necessary for an act to count as refusal. Here, I am merely interested in motivating the notion of misfire for the purposes at hand.

10. This implies that victims of hermeneutical injustice are not necessarily also victims of hermeneutical misfiring; often, hermeneutically marginalised groups are not in a social position of power and privilege that makes them epistemically ignorant in the ways I have outlined.

11. I consider the question of blame only fleetingly. I take up this question in more detail in another paper as well as in my book (Hänel 2018a).

12. See Smith (1983); Zimmerman (1997); Wündisch (2017), to name only a few. Note that my suggestions draw mainly on Rosen and offer only a cursory picture of moral responsibility, blame and culpability; nevertheless, I hope that a thorough analysis of the issue could draw on my brief suggestions here.

13. Here, I will not dive deeper into the debate on moral responsibility but merely consider writings within the debate of epistemic ignorance. I should mention though, that even within the debate on moral responsibility and blameworthiness, some argue that ignorance alone is not an indicator for being blameless. For example, Mason (2015) argues that moral ignorance can be a form of bad will and, hence, agents can be blameworthy even when ignorant.

14. See Hänel (2018a) for a more detailed discussion.

15. I here concentrate on the psychological research. See Baldwin (1998); Arendt (2003); and Young (2011) for philosophical accounts of why blame and guilt can be counterproductive. Note that Bierria (2010) brings into focus another aspect of why we should avoid blame in specific contexts. She argues that blame can put especially black women in a deeply problematic position in so far as they have an impossible choice to make: betray the feminist movement or betray the black movement (by reproducing problematic stereotypes about black men). Furthermore, Young (2011) argues that by pinning blame on one individual, we often absolve others and ignore the shared responsibility that we have as a collective; this seems fitting in light of the fact that the sexist ideology for which we all bear responsibility plays a role in the pervasiveness of sexual violence.

16. See May and Strikwerda (1994) on collective responsibility for rape.

17. Philosophers have started to turn to these insights in recent years. For example, according to Zheng, we can distinguish between responsibility as attributability and responsibility as accountability. Responsibility as accountability ‘depends on the social and institutional practices governing the distribution of duties and burdens across different roles and positions within a society’ (2016, 62). Accordingly, a person X is morally responsible for their actions only when they can be held accountable for them; that is, when ‘it is appropriate for others to enforce certain expectations and demands on those actions’ (63).

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Hilkje Hänel

Hilkje Hänel works as an assistant professor of political theory at Potsdam University. From 2018 to 2020, she worked as an assistant professor in practical philosophy at the Freie University in Berlin. In January 2018, Hänel successfully defended her PhD in philosophy at the Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany. Her research is on the intersection of recognition theory, epistemic injustice, and ideology theory from a feminist point of view. Further interests are philosophy of disability, migration, and non-ideal theory. In 2018, Hänel published her first book What is Rape? with Transcript Publishers. She has published articles in Ergo, Hypatia, and Journal of Social Philosophy.