Connecting domination contracts

ABSTRACT

In Black Rights/White Wrongs, Charles Mills continues his critique of contemporary American political philosophy for ignoring issues of racial oppression, and in particular for ignoring the way that liberal social contracts rest on underlying domination contracts. In this commentary, I will discuss some of the new research inspired by Mills’ account of domination contracts, including recent accounts of the “capability contract” and the “species contract”, and explore how they relate to Mills’ own work on the “racial contract”. While this new research on diverse domination contracts confirms the richness of Mills’ analysis of the social contract tradition, it may also require some revisions to his own preferred vision of how we theorize racial justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial contract
• capacity contract
• sexual contract
• social contract
• species hierarchy
• disability rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I am adapting Arneil’s observation (2009) that Western political theory has not simply ignored justice for people with disabilities but has itself been an obstacle to justice.

2 When the #OscarsSoWhite campaign arose, various commentators suggested we need a #PhilosophySoWhite campaign: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0306-schwitzgebel-cherry-philosophy-so-white-20160306-story.html.

3 Both Pateman (2007) and Nichols (2013) argue that, within the broader category of racial contract, we should distinguish a subcategory of “settler contract”, in which European settlers agree to treat each other as political equals while acknowledging their right to dominate indigenous peoples.

4 For example, see Hobbes: “Over natural fools, children, or madmen there is no law, no more than over brute beasts; nor are they capable of the title of just or unjust, because they had never power to make any covenant or to understand the consequences thereof” (Leviathan II.xxvi.12). Many people draw a sharp distinction between ableism and speciesism, but as pattrice jones notes, the two are conceptually linked: “there’s a word for the idea that basic rights are dependent on particular capabilities: ‘Ableism’. It’s not merely that the most common rationale used to justify human dominion over animals is similar to the rationale used to excuse the mistreatment of people with disability. It the exact same argument! We have capabilities that they don’t have, so we may rightfully force them to labor for little or no compensation. We have capabilities that they don’t have, so we may rightfully restrict or control their reproduction. We have capabilities that they don’t have, so we may rightfully confine them in institutions of total control. We have capabilities that they don’t have, so we may rightfully kill them” (jones 2014, emphasis in original). On the continuities between the capacity contract and the species contract, see also Taylor (2017).

5 Rollo argues that the subjection of children and of colonial peoples rested on “homologous” processes of conceptualizing development from immaturity to full humanity.

6 This is just one of many ways in which the domination contract vis-à-vis animals is used to justify domination of humans who are seen as animal-like. For fuller discussion, see Kim (2015).

7 Mills may in fact be open to this possibility. He recently wrote a positive review of Clifford Simplican’s book on the capacity contract, and acknowledged that it poses challenges to his previous views about the social contract tradition (Mills 2016). However, there is no reference to Clifford Simplican in the new book or any acknowledgement of the new literature on domination contracts regarding children, disability or animals. So it appears he remains wedded to his radical Kantianism.

8 For some preliminary thoughts on how to rethink political philosophy beyond the capacity contract, see Donaldson and Kymlicka (2017).

9 On linking anti-racism and animal rights, see Harper (2010) and Kymlicka and Donaldson (2014).