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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Kristina Lepold, Jennifer McKittrick, Mari Mikkola, Tamar Schapiro, and Kieran Setiya for helpful discussion and comments. Special thanks to Natalie Stoljar for organizing the symposium and for excellent philosophical and editorial advice.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The next several paragraphs draw on Haslanger [forthcoming].
2 Faulconbridge and Procyshyn seem to assume a more technical notion of coordination than I intend. On my view, not all conventions are conventions in Lewis’s [Citation1969] sense, and not all coordination is a solution to a formal coordination problem. The solutions may not be arbitrary; there may not be, in any meaningful sense, common knowledge among participants; the responses may not be rational or mutually advantageous. I am dubious, especially, that preferences should be our starting point. A meaningful sense of preference with respect to the resource in question may be constituted only through the practice that organizes our responses [Anderson Citation2001].
3 On Schapiro’s [2001] view, these are defective actions because they aren’t an exercise of my (free) agency. I would agree that they are defective, but not qua action. I am interested in a wide range of ways in which my agency is conditioned—both enabled and constrained—by my social context. The agency that comes from freely conforming my will to the practice is too refined for my needs.
4 There has been decades of debate in the social sciences over whether structuralist explanations are deterministic and eliminate agency. It is now broadly recognized that structure is not only compatible with agency, but necessary for it. Key contributions include Sewell [Citation1992] and Garfinkel [Citation1981]. I also recommend Einsphar [Citation2010]. See also Haslanger [Citation2016, 2017a: ch. 1] for discussion of specific points that Beeghly raises, and Haslanger [Citation2017b] for my response to Madva’s claim that I’m a structural prioritizer.
5 I am puzzled by Malone’s [Citation2020: 97] claim that my conception of ideology is ‘representational’ rather than ‘dispositional’. My claim is that ideology is a set of public meanings; we take up meanings as dispositions to respond to the world in ways that are then legible (to ourselves and others) in their terms.
6 Robert Gooding-Williams has raised a similar point in conversation. Thanks to him for discussion of this point.
7 Though, this is complicated. On my view, the contemporary social order is such that those who are formed to benefit from capitalism are also held to norms of whiteliness, masculinity, able-bodiedness, and such. The result is that those of us who are successful in the current social order are complicit, implicated in the broader system of, White Supremacy, patriarchy, etc.)
8 Note that the term ‘oppression’ is used broadly for both repression, ideological oppression, and other forms of injustice. It is not part of my project to change this usage. I am specifically interested in ideological oppression as one form of oppression. Moreover, on my account, ideological formation is always in the service of, or functions to sustain, injustice, but doesn’t always do so through the ideological oppression of those in its grip. Ideology may produce injustice by producing subjects capable of repressing others.
9 There is a substantial literature on the issue of ‘fundamental’ moral disagreement, beginning with Brandt [Citation1959].
10 It is valuable to compare this idea with Longino’s [Citation1990] conception of scientific objectivity. These comments are only a gesture towards what constitutes an acceptable standpoint.