Does False Consciousness Necessarily Preclude Moral Blameworthiness?: The Refusal of the Women Antisuffragists

Abstract

Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents.

But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness enables us to see how having it does not in itself render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 antisuffragist manifesto “An Appeal against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterization is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal.

Social philosophers and theorists often analyze occasions of “voluntary victimhood” in terms of false (or ideological) consciousness, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression.¹ But there is an intuitive worry in general that appealing to the notion of false consciousness in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups amounts to victim-blaming by conceptual fiat (see, for example, Superson 1993; Cudd 2006; Hay 2013),² that is, where victim-blaming is understood to refer to blaming practices that focus attention inappropriately on victims in accounting for the relevant harms (Harvey 1999; cf. Matthews 2014).³ This is because simply using the concept of false consciousness to characterize oppressed agents would, allegedly, not only detract attention from underlying unjust structural conditions but also unduly assume an otherwise absent or diminished moral agency. This has contributed to the concept's exile from social philosophy and theory in both “analytic” and “continental” circles (see Jaeggi 2009, 82, n. 17).⁴ Considerations of how to theorize about the false consciousness of the oppressed have always avoided the question of moral blameworthiness with some unease (see, for example, Shelby 2007). The assumption behind the “victim-blaming” intuition, put in Strawsonian terms, is that an individual under false consciousness systematically fails to meet the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions, due to structural distortions of reasoning or knowledge practices, such that their status as a responsible moral agent is thereby undermined.

A paradigmatic case of false consciousness can be found in fin-de-siècle Britain, when 104 prominent women put forward the antisuffragist manifesto “An Appeal against Female Suffrage” (Appeal 1889). The Appeal marked a watershed, women-led response to the purported threat of suffragism at the time—an act that, as some suffragists wryly noted, ran counter not only to the growing need to represent women's interests in legislation but also the very antiparticipatory sentiments that the antisuffragists professed to uphold. There is a general consensus among historians that the Appeal did not simply express the widespread social conservatism of the time but contributed significantly to maintaining this status quo of the parliamentary exclusion of women until their eventual enfranchisement after the First World War (and the profound shifts that it brought to the British workforce).

However, in this case, one might also have the conflicting intuition that it is precisely this false consciousness, and its attendant epistemic sophistication and lack of coercion, that enables one to legitimately lay part of the blame on such agents. There is a sense that the concept brings to focus crucial but otherwise overlooked agents who are partly responsible for contributing to antisuffragism. And, as recent historians have noted, narratives that the women of the Appeal were simply uncritical handmaidens in the antisuffrage cause of men crucially overlooks the unique and thoughtful contribution of the signatories in strategizing and succeeding in “inflecting anti-suffragism with new, more positive emphases designed especially to appeal to female public opinion” in both parliamentary and public debates (Bush 2007, 157; see also Nelson 2004; Delap 2005). The concept of false consciousness provides a constitutive story about how women antisuffragists became a particular type of agent such that we would justifiably attribute the relevant act to them as theirs. False consciousness would thus enable us to see the women antisuffragists as having the same status of agency as their male counterparts (who were themselves largely under the grip of patriarchal ideology), as equally full-fledged members of the moral community. Exempting them as moral agents from the outset would not only be unjustly presumptuous (the antisuffragists themselves only expressed opposition to political equality) but also be counterproductive to the emancipatory cause.⁵ Ordinarily, our blaming practices are thought to have a crucial communicative function, addressing agents and appealing to shared reasons for modifying their attitudes or behavior (see, for example, Calhoun 1989; Houston 1992; Moody-Adams 1994; Fricker 2016a; Mason 2019). In contrast, by theorizing such agents as outside the moral community, we preclude ourselves from enlisting them in collective resistance against a shared oppression and to bring about structural change (cf. Shelby 2007; Jugov and Ypi 2019).⁶

So, although the intuition of exemption from blameworthiness has been often presumed, I wish to cautiously vindicate the second intuition and allay the worry of victim-blaming. I argue that attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness enables us to better see how suffering from it does not in itself render an agent an inappropriate target of blame—that is, one's status as a morally responsible agent is not necessarily undermined by a characterization of false consciousness. To do this, I take up the women of the Appeal as a historical case study to show how they, even under false consciousness, can satisfy both the rationality and epistemic conditions and thereby qualify for blameworthiness in the ordinary sense.⁷ My main contention here is that too often the broad group-level strokes in painting false consciousness as such as irrational, along with focusing on whether a whole category of people can be relevantly aware under situations of oppression, pay insufficient attention to the variety in how the relevant ignorance at the individual level might be nevertheless actively acquired and maintained by the agent as part of their false consciousness.

Important historical work has been done to show how arduous, complex, and often disharmonious it was for women antisuffragists at the time to formulate and publicize their opposition to the suffrage campaign over the decades (as it also was for the suffragists). As such historians have cautioned, our various understandings of the feminist/antifeminist distinction today do not easily map onto the suffragist/antisuffragist distinction, not least because the term feminism was inconsistently deployed and could also be applicable to many antisuffragists. Indeed, a significant number of antisuffragists did not see their opposition to suffrage as a maintenance of a patriarchal status quo, but rather as directing women's progress out of the household toward more appropriate social, yet nonpolitical, roles befitting their gender, for example, education and health care (see, for example, Delap 2005; Heilmann and Sanders 2006; Crozier-De Rosa 2018).⁸ My approach here is not inconsistent with these important observations, which deserve careful attention in their own right, but my interests are nonetheless primarily philosophical. I attend to the circumstances surrounding the Appeal and any subsequent development only to the extent that they elucidate the rationality and epistemic conditions of blameworthiness in signing the Appeal. The narrow focus here on whether we may correctly judge particular signatories as blameworthy for the 1889 Appeal is thus distinct from the broader and far more complex question about how we should judge them (or women antisuffragists in general) for hindering or promoting women's interests on the whole—not to mention questions about what would be achieved by blaming them or whether we have the standing to blame them today.

In what follows, then, I will first give a sketch of the general concept of false consciousness and its constitutive mechanisms, showing how the two diverging intuitions about the culpability of oppressed agents arise (section I). I will then attend specifically to the case of the Appeal, observing how its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both rationality and epistemic conditions for ordinary blameworthiness (section II).⁹ I focus on the details of three prominent women of the Appeal—Louise Creighton, Beatrice Webb, and Mary (Humphry) Ward—arguing that the irrationality characterization is unsustainable beyond the group-level diagnosis, and that the women of the Appeal's capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was demonstrably not compromised despite their being correctly understood as having false consciousness. Then, drawing on recent work on epistemic injustice and attending to the women's own writings, I argue that there were indeed culpable mechanisms at play in the case of their false consciousness—for example, testimonial injustice and willful hermeneutic ignorance—rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal. Last, I return to what the case study means for the relationship between the concept of false consciousness and blameworthiness in general, particularly in terms of how such careful historical attention helps refine and delimit our use of the concept as social philosophers or theorists (section III).

I. False Consciousness

False or ideological consciousness is often characterized as a set of attitudes that are epistemically, functionally, and genetically “false” (Geuss 1981; Meyerson 1991; Shelby 2003). That is, it is a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant beliefs that constitute the motivating and/or (putatively) normative reasons for an individual to act in ways that maintain a structure of oppression, and that systematically form in virtue of a given structure of oppression.¹⁰ As a critical concept employed by social philosophers and theorists, false consciousness not only enables us to attend to otherwise neglected oppressive aspects of (that is, “problematize”) a given social structure that might have initially appeared benign, but, in doing so, orients us toward the possibility of amelioration (see Haslanger 2005; Celikates 2017). It is thus to be understood as the individual, as opposed to structural, side of the same coin as the concept of ideology (see Jaeggi 2009). Whereas the latter concerns the schematization of resources and agents at the collective level, false consciousness concerns the attitudes of agents at the individual level under these schemas, inasmuch as they occupy a particular node. But its individual-level (or nodal-level) analysis cannot be entirely divorced from the structural. Analyzing false consciousness concerns not just how oppressed individuals themselves come to systematically form and maintain certain ignorant beliefs as (putatively) true and normative, given their position within relevant structures, but, further, how beliefs of such content are themselves formed and maintained in these structures. Such analyses would also have to involve how individuals might nevertheless resist the formation or maintenance of such beliefs (sometimes systematically)—that is, the possibility of emancipatory consciousness.

Most social philosophers and theorists may be broadly characterize as holding that false consciousness involves an individual (belonging either to oppressor or oppressed groups) mistaking a certain socially objectified understanding of themselves as natural self-understanding (or another functionally similar, authoritative, and immutable domain, for example, divine), due to the historical stabilization of shared pre-existing structures of oppression (see, for example, Cudd 2006). This involves stabilizing mechanisms (sometimes called “distortion mechanisms”) that occur systematically at both individual and structural levels, resulting in a looping effect in an individual's self-understanding given their position in the relevant structure (Haslanger 2011). This looping effect, crucially, involves more than the classification and the classified people.¹¹ That is, there are also feedback loops among institutions, knowledge, and experts (Hacking 2007). At the individual level, then, this includes: Nash equilibria, stereotype threat/boost, implicit bias, cognitive failure, preference adaptation, wishful thinking, speech act accommodation, epistemic vice (for example, arrogance, laziness), and first-order epistemic exclusions (for example, testimonial injustice). At the structural level, this includes: market equilibria, culture industry, consumer production, and second- and third-order epistemic exclusions (for example, hermeneutical injustice or contributory injustice) (see Rosen 1996; Cudd 2006; Haslanger 2011; Dotson 2014; Langton 2015; Stanley 2015; Adorno and Horkheimer 2016; Mallon 2016; Celikates 2017; Mason and Wilson 2017).

Notably, a given form of false consciousness is indexed to the domain of its social structure. That is, the content of the relevant ignorant beliefs is circumscribed by the limits of the schemas and the resources constituting the structure (for example, a form of false consciousness pertaining to European cisheterosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain would not involve beliefs with content concerning the stellar wind pressure experienced by Proxima Centauri b). And because different social structures can schematize over the same resources and agents (for example, in overlapping cases of oppression), false consciousness can either be compounded or eroded. In compounding, schemas combine such that the set of ignorant beliefs can gain not only content but further stabilizing mechanisms that reinforce evidence-resistance. In erosion, it could ex hypothesi happen in at least two ways: epistemic friction and radical marginalization. Epistemic friction occurs when incompatible schemas and stabilizing mechanisms run up against each other and the resultant discordance conduces to the possibility of what José Medina calls “meta-lucidity,” which “provides insights into the functioning of perspectives that makes it possible to redraw [one's] cognitive maps, to redescribe [one's] experiences, and to reconceptualize [one's] ways of relating to others” (Medina 2013, 47). In radical marginalization, according to classical Marxism, an agent (or group of them) is so excluded from social practices that stabilizing mechanisms do not have any grip, and there is no feedback loop conducing to the internalization of socially objectified self-understanding.¹² But, again, both these erosions render emancipatory consciousness only possible and cannot guarantee actualization—unfortunately, it is perhaps just as common, if not more so, that false consciousness is reinforced by epistemic friction (see Nyhan and Reifler 2010).

Given this analytical framework for false consciousness, then, we can now account for how the diverging intuitions of exculpation and culpability arise, considering the diverse mechanisms and different aspects of the heterogeneity of false consciousness.¹³ An oppressed individual's agency and reasons are conceptualized as both constrained and constituted within a structure of oppression, and when the individual-level mechanisms salient for the constitution are culpable, we would regard the agent as blameworthy for the issuing action. This does not mean, however, that false consciousness is, or should be, completely reducible to its constituent mechanisms.¹⁴ The concept not only plays a crucial regulative role in guiding research in social philosophy within critical projects, emphasizing systematic coordination of the constituent mechanisms, but adequate normative and epistemological assessments of false consciousness can be found only at the structural level, such as in ideology critique (Celikates 2017). The mechanisms alone do not guarantee that the beliefs would be ignorant to the extent that they systematically motivate acts of oppression. Explanations appealing to false consciousness are thus “structural explanations” as Sally Haslanger understands them—that is, they help us understand “the behavior of the individual given their place in a structure” and also understand “the individual as the instance of a type—a type defined by the conditions for existing at that node” (Haslanger 2016, 129).

So the ethical task here of determining whether a specific agent is nonetheless morally responsible would involve mainly the individual-level analysis of the form of false consciousness, attending to the constitutive stabilizing mechanisms salient for the agent, given their position within the relevant structure(s), and the structural-level analysis only insofar as it might restrict or mask rationality, or render ignorance nonculpable.¹⁵

II. The Case of the Women Antisuffragists

Before I get to my main argument, it is worth summarizing the argument of the Appeal. It was published in June 1889 in the Nineteenth Century, a mainstream periodical that published debates of leading intellectuals at the time, with a number of unspecified signatories who were largely upper-class women. The Appeal's rejection of suffragism was grounded in the belief that “the limits fixed by the physical constitution of women, and by the fundamental difference which must always exist between their main occupations and those of men” made it such that “the necessary and normal experience of women . . . does not and can never provide them with such materials for sound judgment as are open to men” with respect to parliamentary concerns (Appeal 1889, [reprinted in Nelson 2004, 26]). Effectively, the Appeal argued that women already influence politics in an indirect way that would ensure that their different interests and capacities are accorded due weight in parliamentary decision-making: suffrage was thus unnecessary and counterproductive. What undergirded this was a self-understanding of women of the Appeal as being naturally different in a way that excluded them from the political sphere. According to the Appeal, women's suffrage was both unnecessary and antithetical to their own proper domain of activity, in that direct participation would lead to epistemic and ethical weightlifting (cf. Williams 1995). According to the Appeal, whereas men were political animals, women were domestic ones.

From this, it is clear how it would be appropriate for us to apply the concept of false consciousness to the women of the Appeal: their belief that women were naturally deficient in political judgment is patently false (epistemic falsity), arising out of the social conservatism of the time (genetic falsity), and it motivated them to sign a manifesto that buttressed the antisuffragist movement (functional falsity). But despite satisfying the analytic conditions of the concept, I will now show that historical attention to the women of the Appeal's position in fin-de-siècle Britain reveals that the stabilizing mechanisms involved do not undermine their status as morally responsible agents. That is, they would still be blameworthy insofar as the mechanisms do not undermine the rationality and epistemic conditions.

The Rationality Condition

As mentioned at the outset, the concept of false consciousness has often been taken to imply an exempting irrationality on the part of the affected agent. Carol Hay, for example, argues that oppression may damage one's rational capacities permanently and thus disqualify them as a blameworthy agent, citing false consciousness (she calls it “self-deception”) as a “classic” case of such resultant irrationality, wherein “oppressive social systems create incentives for oppressed people to believe certain falsehoods about themselves, contrary to their own evidence” (Hay 2013, 123–24; cf. Superson 1993). It would thus be tempting to think that the women of the Appeal, under conditions of patriarchy, suffered from some sort of collective motivated irrationality, inasmuch as this suggested an inability to respond to reasons to the extent that they would compromise their own interests. After all, the Appeal's success in maintaining the status quo of the parliamentary exclusion of women was not only novel in its women-friendly packaging of antisuffragism, but, as suffragist Ray Strachey solemnly recorded in 1928, it “presented [a new argument] to the [antisuffragist] side. ‘Women themselves don't want the vote,’ they could now say; unfortunately it was partly true” (Strachey 1978, 285).

But this “top-down” approach is mereologically suspect: it considers the social-level properties of the women of the Appeal as being instantiated at the individual level simply in virtue of them being in the group. Although the claim of systematic irrationality might be maintained at the level of the signatories as a collective, it is harder to maintain at the individual level of analysis, when we attend to the various mechanisms that formed and maintained the belief in the natural incapacity of women for political activity.

As mentioned at the outset, and despite the relative dearth of historical attention to antisuffragists compared to suffragists, antisuffragism was neither a fringe nor homogeneous stance among women at the time. Suffragists such as Millicent Fawcett and Margaret Dilke swiftly and acerbically responded in the July issues of the Nineteenth Century and Fortnightly Review, but with a hundred signed in support of the Appeal, thousands more signatures came in the August issue of the Nineteenth Century. The political equality of women was far from clear as a settled moral fact for the zeitgeist, and there were internal disagreements even among those who later organized themselves as the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League (1908–1910). Further, much antisuffragist sentiment was left unexpressed in the public sphere, not only partly as a “logical extension of their reluctance to take to the stage of parliamentary politics” but also because of “their positive commitment to a paradigm of womanhood characterized by altruistic femininity, devotion to family duties, and inconspicuous public service in the extended domestic setting of local communities” (Bush 2007, 3; see also Heilmann and Sanders 2006; Crozier-De Rosa 2018).

As with all forms of false consciousness, the content of the ignorant beliefs of the women of the Appeal was noticeably bound to the domain of its domestic social structures (although this was only slowly being extended by the influx of women into the labor market). These women were perfectly capable of responding to relevant reasons in other aspects of social life and were well-respected in doing so: Beatrice Webb was a leading sociologist of the cooperative movement and a co-founder of the London School of Economics; Mary Ward was an accomplished novelist who was a prominent advocate for the education of the poor as a means for “equalization” in society; Louise Creighton was the co-founder and first president of the bipartisan National Union of Women Workers (NUWW), which coordinated women volunteers throughout Britain.

One might thus instead follow Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill in adopting a “bottom-up” mechanical approach to the question of irrationality, guided by a notion of false consciousness (see, for example, Cudd 2006). In “Enfranchisement of Women,” the central question for Taylor and Mill was “why the existence of one-half the species should be merely ancillary to that of the other—why each woman should be a mere appendage to a man, allowed to have no interests of her own, that there may be nothing to compete in her mind with his interests and his pleasure” (Taylor and Mill 1851, reprinted in Nelson 2004, 12). They observed that women have been made to “consider as their appropriate virtues” their (at minimum) political dependence on men (13). Later, in The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill noted:

All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man. (Mill 1995, 132–33)

But though it might well have been the case that global autonomy was compromised in the declaration of the Appeal (that is, the women's ability to determine their own ends across the span of their lives), it is less clear that local autonomy is at all compromised for the women of the Appeal (that is, their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons for the execution of individual acts) since questions about whether one should have, say, potatoes and molasses for supper would not fall under the purview of the relevant form of false consciousness here (McKenna 2005; Oshana 2005). And although some might argue that one's capacity to respond appropriately to reasons may be suitably compromised under oppression, these arguments have been concerned largely with cases where preference-adaptation occurs—that is, when an individual adjusts preferences in light of their frustration (see, for example, Hay 2013; Cudd 2015). It is unclear, however, how the mechanism of preference-adaptation would be very salient for the women of the Appeal in their position, given that they were upper- and middle-class women (none of them were working-class). Webb, for example, herself admits that “had [she] been a man, self-respect, family pressure and the public opinion of [her] class would have pushed [her] into a money-making profession; as a mere woman, [she] could carve out a career of disinterested research” (Webb 1929, 355). Although these women might have been politically excluded, they were by no means frustrated to the extent that their responsiveness to reasons would be compromised, and they nevertheless did have overlapping social concerns with suffragists as was seen in the NUWW (and also in their friendships across partisan lines).¹⁶

Moreover, it is hard to maintain that the women's local autonomy was so compromised to warrant exculpation, given what we know about the degree of sophistication and strategizing that went into publishing the manifesto. The Appeal was primarily a result of the efforts of co-instigators Ward and Creighton. Creighton herself had expressed, and was compelled by, fears that the increased frequency of franchise attempts in the House of Commons and a sympathetic Prime Minister “[made] it seem likely that Parliament might suddenly pass a bill granting female suffrage” (Creighton 1889a, 146). It would not come as a surprise that the editor of the Nineteenth Century, James Knowles, was a known antisuffragist and saw Ward's and Creighton's enthusiasm as a welcome means for his periodical to intervene in the ongoing suffragism debates at such a critical juncture (Bush 2007, 144). But the production and publication of the manifesto was an affair of joint decision-making rather than one of Knowles's sole orchestration. Moreover, Ward and Creighton were also self-consciously attempting to distance themselves from the “semi-religious beliefs on the natural and necessary position of women” held by their male counterparts, which they did not “altogether share” (Ward 1889, 146).

From these considerations, then, we can safely conclude that the capacity to respond to relevant reasons was neither restricted nor masked in any absolute or exemptive way. After all, false consciousness cannot be exemptive simpliciter if we are not also willing to exempt oppressors who suffer it by the same token—there is surely an absurdity in excluding a good portion of the population from the outset as morally responsible agents. So though irrationality might actually be the right diagnosis for other forms of false consciousness elsewhere (for example, those involving preference-adaptation), the false consciousness of the women of the Appeal would be better characterized as a matter of having bad premises. That is, the more fruitful approach is not whether they had the capacity to adequately weigh up what was right or wrong in their act of signing, but whether they had the awareness of what was right and wrong to begin with.

The Epistemic Condition

It is not uncommon for agents affected by false consciousness to be regarded as exempt from blameworthiness on account of failing to satisfy the epistemic condition. Ann Cudd, for example, thinks that false consciousness renders an agent nonculpably ignorant, noting that “the oppressed may well not understand the oppression they suffer, for it is often a part of their oppression that it is hidden from them under the guises of tradition or divine command or the natural order of things” (Cudd 2006, 198). It is thus also tempting to compare the women of the Appeal with the usual examples found in discussions on culpable ignorance, such as ancient slaveholders or sexist US fathers in the 1950s (see, for example, Benson 2001; Rosen 2003; Guerrero 2007; Sher 2017). Much of the debate surrounding these examples concerns whether the circumstantial epistemic bad luck that these agents find themselves in is sufficient to exculpate, given that, for example, “it would have taken a moral genius to see through to the wrongness of chattel slavery” (Rosen 2003, 66; cf. Fricker 2007, 98–107). But there are at least two disanalogies here, at individual and structural levels of analyses.

At the individual level, the usual comparisons are almost always cases wherein the agents under analysis are clearly members of the oppressing group—for example, the “run-of-the-mill,” first-world, cishet, white, middle-class man in Gideon Rosen's classic case (Rosen 2003)—and not the oppressed: they would not be victims but paradigmatic beneficiaries of epistemic injustice. Perhaps supporting weaker intuitions to exculpate in these cases, the relevant forms of false consciousnesses and corollary stabilizing mechanisms in these would be substantially different from those cases pertaining to members of oppressed groups (for example, stereotype boost vs. stereotype threat).

At the structural level, the applicability of the concept of false consciousness to the women antisuffragists itself distinguishes this case from these comparisons: where a lack of epistemic friction is often thought to characterize cases such as that of ancient slaveholders, evidence-resistance in the case of the antisuffragists presupposes encounter with dissenting views. In this case, it was clear that there was ample counterevidence: long-standing suffragist arguments (the centenary of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women was just around the corner) and recent shifts in the labor market.¹⁷ Importantly, the latter meant being faced with the conflict between the social consciousnesses arising out of membership in Victorian society as politically dependent and that out of membership in the labor market as economically independent—both of which schematized the same resources. As Dilke replied to the Appeal,

The supporters of woman suffrage do not believe in indirect representation under any circumstances, but least of all when the influx of women into the labour market brings them, whether they will it or no, into competition with those whose interests and capacities are different; it is not the Woman Suffrage Societies that have brought about this great social change. A man is no longer expected, even in well-to-do middle-class society, to support his adult sisters and daughters as well as his wife and infant children. The societies, accepting the new state of things, wish to protect the earning of these women, to teach them self-reliance, to help them in the only way human beings can be efficiently helped—shown how to help themselves.

. . . The rapidly increasing wealth of the middle classes has deprived thousands of women of the necessity for household toil; but education and increased opportunities for intellectual and public work draw these same women, if not in the first, then in the second generation, into busy useful lives, giving satisfaction to themselves and benefit to the community at large. (Dilke 1889, [reprinted in Nelson, 2004, 38–40])

We see concrete demonstrations of such epistemic friction giving rise to emancipatory consciousness in the public defections of Webb and Creighton to, and in their vocal support for, the suffragist cause between the Appeal's publication and the formation of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League in 1908. In 1906, Creighton announced to the NUWW that she realized that, given the increasing role women were playing in party politics, they needed to have “the responsibility of the vote” (Creighton 1994, 89, 146).¹⁸ A few days later, Webb wrote a public letter to Fawcett explaining that she now realized that there was a need “to permit this growing consciousness among women—that their particular social obligations compel them to claim a share in the conduct of political affairs” by “finding a constitutional channel” (Webb 1906, reprinted in Webb 1975, 363). However, the suffragist responses served only to reinforce Ward's antisuffragist position, and she intensified her efforts against suffragism in the following years.

The question concerning us, therefore, is whether stabilizing mechanisms specific to the women of the Appeal—which were disrupted for Creighton and Webb, or reinforced for Ward—would have made them culpable for their ignorance, such that judgments that they were blameworthy for signing are justified. And from the suffragists’ indignant replies, we can gather an affirmative answer: testimonial injustice and willful hermeneutical ignorance. That is, influenced by the prejudices surrounding women and lower classes, the women antisuffragists not only gave a deflated level of credibility to the suffragists, but also refused to adopt the alternate epistemic resources offered by them. Dilke, for example, laments precisely the neglect of their claims in her reply to the Appeal:

Those who have spoken and written repeatedly on this subject for the last dozen years have a feeling of hesitation and shyness at being obliged to use the same arguments again and again, and to bring but little fresh fuel to feed the furnace of public opinion; but it is only necessary to read through the appeal with care to find that the opponents of further progress have simply burnished up the old weapons and sharpened the time-worn steel.¹⁹

. . . These ladies take upon themselves to say the time has come to arrest all further progress; ignoring the fact that as the old bonds and fetters fall away from women's limbs new requirements arise, new possibilities open out before them, and careers that but a short quarter of a century ago would have seemed far out of their reach now open before them and seem to call able and well-educated women to fill posts for which their training has fitted them.

. . . Ladies of intellect and social standing can always make their voices heard, can always write to the papers and magazines, can command the sympathy and attention of public men whenever they feel they receive less than justice. But the supporters of woman suffrage aspire to help those other women whose lives are spent in humble toil, whose work is ill paid, whose education has been defective or entirely neglected. (Dilke 1889, reprinted in Nelson 2004, 37–38)

Fawcett was also keen to point out the exclusion, alongside the consequences of the continual lack of enfranchisement of women:

A further consideration of the Nineteenth Century list of names shows that it contains a very large preponderance of ladies to whom the lines of life have fallen in pleasant places. There are very few among them of the women who have had to face the battle of life alone, to earn their living by daily hard work. Women of this class generally feel the injustice of their want of representation. The weight of taxation falls upon them just as if they were men, and they do not see why representation should not go with taxation in their case, simply because their physical strength is less than that of men. (Fawcett 1889, reprinted in Nelson 2004, 31)

The ladies in The Nineteenth Century support their case by stating that “all the principal injustices of the law toward women have been amended by means of the existing constitutional machinery.” They may not know that the law still recognises in a mother no legal rights over her children during the lifetime of her husband. . . . The inequality of the divorce law is another well-known instance of the cases in which the existing constitutional machinery has remained placidly content with a state of things unjust to women. The inequalities of the law of intestacy, as regards men and women, are so flagrant as to be almost ludicrous. Existing constitutional machinery has arranged that in almost every case of intestacy the male relatives got the lion's share.

. . . A similar kind of inequality is maintained as regards probate. . . . It is unnecessary to point out that to the whole professional class this necessity of paying probate on what in many cases is the widow's own property, comes at a time when she is impoverished by the death of the chief bread-winner of the family. No such harassing and exacting demands are made upon a man who loses his wife. The assumption of the law is that all their joint property is his only, and he pays no probate on plate, furniture, &c., which they may have worked for and bought together. (Women's Suffrage: A Reply 1889, reprinted in Nelson 2004, 47–48)²⁰

Fawcett's and Dilke's replies expressed feelings of resentment and indignation at how the women of the Appeal seemed to have not only unjustly misrecognized the political status of women but also contributed to normalizing the socioeconomic injustices that were being passed over by the systematic underrepresentation of women's concerns in legislation.²¹ But in enacting testimonial injustice, the women of the Appeal not only harmed women by prolonging parliamentary exclusion of their interests, but also their capacity as knowers (Fricker 2007).²² That is, women were excluded from the outset as full participants in the epistemic community, where default inclusion is meant to be constitutive of the human condition. Further, as often happens in cases of testimonial injustice, the epistemic harm is compounded in diminished self-confidence in one's beliefs or own epistemic capacities: Strachey observed a lamentable “phase of discouragement” among suffragists in the aftermath of the Appeal, leading eventually to the militancy of the Suffragettes (Strachey 1978, 285).

There might be a natural concern that the testimonial injustice was itself a product of other exculpatory stabilizing mechanisms constituting false consciousness. Antisuffragist sentiments, after all, were widespread at the time, and there was definitely some measure of hermeneutical injustice. That is, there was some lacuna in the collective conceptual resource: many women were unable to make sense of their own social experience (for example, the concept of an independent woman). But, at best, this period of overall moral uncertainty involved a situation of a “midway” rather than “maximal” hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2016b, 167). That is, rather than a complete absence of the relevant conceptual resource, suffragist groups involved “localised or in-group hermeneutical practices that [were] nonetheless not shared across further social space” (166). But why these practices did not extend beyond suffragist social spaces into those of the women of the Appeal despite their best efforts, then, might be said to be a case of contributory injustice—wherein “an epistemic agent's willful hermeneutical ignorance [that is, a willful refusal to acknowledge epistemic tools developed by marginalized groups] in maintaining and utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources thwarts a knower's ability to contribute to shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community by compromising her epistemic agency” (Dotson 2012, 32, emphasis mine; cf. Pohlhaus, Jr. 2012).

It is common to adopt a vice-based approach in cases of epistemic oppression (Fricker 2007; Medina 2013). So just as the instantiation of the (moral-intellectual) vices of arrogance and laziness may render someone's cultural ignorance culpable, and on that basis they would be blameworthy for an action motivated by culturally ignorant belief, that the women of the Appeal instantiated the vices of testimonial injustice and willful hermeneutical ignorance should suffice to render their ignorance culpable (cf. Mason and Wilson 2017). But, whether conceived of in vice-epistemological terms or otherwise, one might thus conclude from these considerations that the women of the Appeal were culpably ignorant on account of testimonial injustice and willful hermeneutical ignorance, and accordingly blameworthy for the publication of the Appeal that hindered the suffrage movement.

Nevertheless, there might be lurking worries that the testimonial injustice of the women of the Appeal was a result of a prior state of false consciousness that was nonculpably constituted. Simply having a midway rather than maximal case of hermeneutical injustice, for one, does not guarantee that willful hermeneutical ignorance was the salient difference-making mechanism for any of the women of the Appeal. Still, if all we seem to require is better evidence to determine which were the salient mechanisms for the women of the Appeal, this would not be problematic for the position set out here, since my claim is simply that the concept of false consciousness would not necessarily rule out blameworthiness. And, attending to Creighton's and Webb's explicit reflections about their aforementioned defection, we find that a number of stabilizing mechanisms sustained their beliefs—none of which did they regard as justificatory and all of which they felt remorse for. Ward, unfortunately, was sadly unmoved even in spite of losing the antisuffrage cause—but with the relevant stabilizing mechanisms no less discernible.

Creighton's 1906 public announcement of her change in stance was no doubt due at least to her involvement with the NUWW from her presidency in 1895, as a result of which she traveled broadly and “gained a wide knowledge of all kinds of women's questions,” coming to eventually feel that “women made great progress, both in speaking and in business capacity” (Creighton 1994, 116). Admitting in her later memoirs that instigating the Appeal “was a mistake on [her] part,” and that she had “always hated everything that was concerned with political parties,” Creighton noted that “[w]hat was most decisive in leading [her] to change [her] opinion some years afterwards” was her own observation that women needed the vote for their growing participation in “party politics” (89).²³ It was also claimed that “her sympathy with the industrial women in the north had led her to see the need of the vote to protect their interests as wage earners” (Covert 2000, 302).

Yet Fawcett's 1889 reply (to which Creighton herself had provided a public rejoinder a month later) had already pointed out the need for suffrage to protect working-class women, in addition to pointing out the contradiction of the Appeal in holding that women could not form “sound judgments” on matters of “constitutional change” and yet nonetheless organized and worked to elect male party candidates (for example, the Primrose League). Creighton did not obviously seem to pay much attention to these points at the time of the Appeal and recorded that she only realized these for herself later. In this, then, we find that Creighton's testimonial injustice was a result of a willful hermeneutical ignorance on her part. Rather than heeding Fawcett's reply at the time and during her early tenure as the president of the NUWW, Creighton had refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the suffragist hermeneutical resources as they were set forth at the time. In Creighton's 1889 rejoinder, she had insistently maintained, against women's participation in parliamentary decision-making, that “If the vote was the privilege of the wise and the educated, many women might justly claim it. But it is the propelling power of a part of the machinery of government which has always belonged to one sex” (Creighton 1889b, 351).

Admittedly, there is some suggestion of the mechanism of stereotype threat in her memoirs. Creighton noted that she was afraid that her recantation would take place too soon after her husband's passing in 1901, such that she would seem to have been against suffrage because of her husband's influence—even though no one had said this publicly and even though Mandell Creighton himself was not opposed to suffrage and had “left [her] absolutely free to form and express [her] own opinions” (Creighton 1994, 89). But the nonculpable mechanism of stereotype threat here was more relevant for the announcement of her opinions rather than the maintenance of her beliefs about suffrage per se.

Unlike Creighton, Webb notes in her semi-autobiographical volumes that, although she “delayed [her] public recantation for nearly twenty years,” she “immediately and resolutely withdrew from that particular controversy” upon Fawcett's “indignant retort” to the Appeal (Webb 1929, 354; cf. 1975, 361). An entry in her manuscript diary, dated only a few days after Fawcett's reply, records her refusal of antisuffragists’ requests of her, given her social and intellectual standing, to respond to Fawcett's “retort” in the Nineteenth Century:

At present I am anxious to keep out of the controversy. I have as yet accomplished no work which gives me a right to speak as a representative of the class Mrs. Fawcett would enfranchise: celibate women. And to be frank, I am not sure of my ground; I am not certain whether the strong prejudice I have against political life and political methods does not influence my judgement on the question of enfranchising women. (Webb 1929, 354)

Referring to this “strong prejudice,” Webb later confessed that her “false step” arising out of her being “antifeminist in feeling [was] easy to explain, though impossible to justify”:

Conservative by temperament, and antidemocratic through social environment, I had reacted against the narrow outlook and exasperated tone of some of the pioneers of women's suffrage, with their continuous clamour for the Rights of Women. Also, my dislike of the current parliamentary politics of the Tory and Whig “ins” and “outs” seemed a sort of argument against the immersion of women in this atmosphere. But the root of my antifeminism lay in the fact that I had never myself suffered the disabilities assumed to arise from my sex. (Webb 1975, 361, emphasis mine)²⁴

Thus, unlike Creighton, Fawcett's “indignant retort” was what made Webb hesitate about the claim that the “principal injustices of the law” toward working-class women were indeed “amended by means of the existing constitutional machinery,” as she had supported in the Appeal. Although it took some time for her “old prejudice” to eventually “evaporate” altogether, it is noteworthy that it was precisely the suffragists’ reactive attitude of indignation (importantly thought to be constitutive of blame) against the signatories that began Webb's eventual epistemic erosion (Webb 1975, 361).²⁵ Webb's testimonial injustice against the women of “exasperated tone” at the time of the Appeal, then, was admittedly not a matter of willful hermeneutical ignorance. However, she herself confessed later that it had been failure of her own procedural epistemic duties as an “impartial investigator of women's questions,” due to the intellectual arrogance she mentioned (360).

Unfortunately, unlike Creighton and Webb, Ward passed away less than a year after she planned to write about her own reflections on her participation in the antisuffrage campaigns (Ward 1919). But when we attend to her response to suffragist replies over the years after the Appeal, we see not only a repetition of the “same” arguments she had set forth with Creighton in the Appeal “again and again,” but an intensifying thirty-year effort to withhold the extension of suffrage to women—leading eventually to her deflation and defeatism when it was finally won. In a 1910 polemic for The Times, Ward went as far as to describe women as “necessarily ignorant” (Ward 1910). And in her final plea to the House of Lords in January 1918, before the vote, Ward clearly heeded none of the arguments that had won over her other contemporaries: Ward continued to insist that, “because of the conditions of their sex,” women were “the less educated, and more excitable, the less skilled, and less responsible elements in [Britain's] population” and indeed that, with the War, “[t]he physical force argument—that physical force is the ultimate sanction of the Parliamentary vote—stands stronger to-day than ever” (Ward 1918a, 48–49, 55).²⁶ Presuming that she spoke on behalf of more women than did the suffragists, Ward continued to deny not only that women were capable of political participation but that they desired suffrage—in spite of organizations such as the Primrose League or the Suffragettes. After the vote, she wrote defiantly to Creighton: “Well now, thank goodness it is over. . . . Now the question is what the women will do with their vote. I can only hope that you and Mrs Fawcett are right and I am wrong” (Ward 1918b, quoted in Bush 2007, 290).²⁷

What is crucial in interpreting these efforts by Ward is that in her acclaimed novels, she nevertheless very explicitly and penetratingly explores various suffragist positions through her characters: Marcella (1894), which she began writing three years after the Appeal, ends with a balance between the “liberty” and “equality” of woman and her social duties; in Delia Blanchflower (1914), the eponymous heroine oscillates convincingly between militant and nonmilitant forms of suffragism, even prompting an American reviewer unfamiliar with Ward's antisuffragism to mistake her for a suffragist (Sutton-Ramspeck 2000). Given that, in spite of these aesthetic sympathies, Ward was still politically unsympathetic to the suffrage cause, it would thus not be unsafe to conclude that, like Creighton and Webb, both intellectual arrogance and willful hermeneutical ignorance were the salient mechanisms lying behind the testimonial injustice that maintained her false consciousness—if not before, then at least definitely in the years after the Appeal.

III. False Consciousness and Blameworthiness

Despite its historical and localized nature, the case of the women antisuffragists provides a useful heuristic for clarifying the possibility and plausibility of blameworthiness under false consciousness more generally across other spheres of oppression and where they overlap (for example, ableist, economic, gendered, racial). There are a few reasons why this case study is particularly amenable to this end. First, the reasons of both antisuffragists and suffragists, as educated and influential women, were well articulated and documented in fictional and nonfictional works and correspondence. Second, the principled, planned, and protracted efforts of a significant number of the antisuffragists against suffragism unfortunately echoes among a significant number of women antifeminists arguing for the political exclusion of women on the basis of natural differences even today (see Coulter 2007; Bloomfield 2016). Third, there is near-universal agreement today that women's suffrage is morally desirable, irrespective of the difficulties that many women might nevertheless still face in exercising it. This is particularly important for us as ethicists and social philosophers, since normative and methodological worries about who gets to assess that a given consciousness is “false,” and how, can thus be largely kept at bay for our present inquiries into blameworthiness. Fourth, for better or worse, the dominant discourse of the 1889 Appeal was confined largely to one to two spheres of oppression: gender and economic. This is not to say that other spheres (for example, colonialism) should be neglected in general, but only that they are not as salient for the particular instances of false consciousness under consideration here.²⁸ As such, we are provided a relatively tidy basis upon which social philosophers may extrapolate the present examination of the relation between false consciousness and blameworthiness to more overlapping, complex cases of oppression (for example, women's antifeminism in the colonies, or racism within queer communities in postcolonial Singapore).

We have seen from the case study that false consciousness does not necessarily exempt one from blameworthiness; where culpable mechanisms (for example, testimonial injustice) are salient, it may even render one blameworthy. Given the heterogeneity of false consciousness's mechanisms, neither the rationality nor epistemic conditions are necessarily compromised, as the initial intuitive worry set it out to be. An agent's responsiveness to reasons under false consciousness is limited largely to the particular ideology's domain, unless it involves mechanisms such as preference-adaptation. An agent may also be culpably ignorant under false consciousness, such as if the relevant evidence-resistant attitudes are sustained by (moral-intellectual) vices where nonculpable mechanisms are not salient in the constitution of those vices. The use of the concept of false consciousness, therefore, is not as morally problematic as some denigrators have suspected—although it should nevertheless be invoked judiciously.²⁹

Further, as in Webb's case, we have also seen that (ordinary) blame, if understood at least in terms of appropriate reactive attitudes (for example, resentment, indignation) or in terms of addressing the agent and appealing to shared reasons for modifying their attitudes or behavior, may be itself instrumental to the epistemic erosion of a given false consciousness.³⁰ In cases where a given false consciousness does not thematize over the reasons to which blame would appeal, the act presents to the relevant agent an instance of epistemic friction. This, as Medina pointed out and as we have seen in Webb's awareness of her intellectual prejudices, provides an opportunity for developing meta-lucidity. But, to emphasize, this is only a possibility. In other cases perhaps closer to Creighton's (whose own rejoinder brought her national fame as an antisuffragist), ordinarily blame might seem to have only a backfire effect. What the conditions are for erosive ordinary blame, then, is an important topic for further investigation.

It might be objected that, in the examples given in the case study, Creighton and Webb did not suffer false consciousness—at most Ward did, as evidenced by her persistent beliefs and behavior. However, such an objection involves unnecessarily strict criteria for what false consciousness consists in that is not justified by its role in the critical project. The regulatory concept is meant only to guide research into the contributory elements of structures of oppression and point toward potential sites of amelioration. Both Creighton and Webb fall squarely under the definition of false consciousness: having evidence-resistant beliefs (epistemic falsity), which motivated them to reinforce a particular structure of oppression (functional falsity), and in virtue of which they formed and maintained those very beliefs (genetic falsity). To deny that false consciousness was present, if it were eroded, seems to be dangerously pessimistic about the possibility of emancipatory consciousness forming among the oppressed. Moreover, the shedding of false consciousness for both of them, involving a comprehensive reformation of their social self-understanding, took years before the hold that ideological mechanisms had on them eroded, and also took great emotional tolls, such as in losing close friendships (as was the case between Creighton and Ward).

Still, the above objection might be coming from a more fundamental worry that if social theorists simply obtain sufficient evidence for the mechanisms behind an agent's psychological makeup and development, the concept of false consciousness itself would thereby be made explanatorily redundant for our blaming practices (apart from functioning as a heuristic for our evidence-gathering). Further, we seem to be moving away from a structural approach into a merely individualist analysis. Under the individualist analysis, it would seem that the concept of false consciousness loses explanatory traction since, as a structural explanation, it characterizes an individual as an instance of a type existing at a structural node. What we would need, then, are not structural analyses—although they may be useful heuristically—but simply better epistemic warrant concerning the individual. Another related worry might be that willful hermeneutical ignorance cannot be singled out from the nexus of the myriad constitutive individual-level and structural-level mechanisms of false consciousness as the mechanism that specifically resulted in the testimonial injustice of the women of the Appeal. So even if there were culpable mechanisms, the general worry is that they work systematically alongside nonculpable ones in a way that renders them inextricable, insufficient conditions on their own.

But these worries are misplaced and conflate a number of concerns. First, mechanisms such as testimonial injustice, willful hermeneutical ignorance, or stereotype threat are structural notions: structural marginalization is constitutive of them. Second, we need to distinguish between two intersecting but very different projects here: one that concerns regulating the social research of groups and another that concerns how we, as agents within a moral community, are to respond to fellow agents within it. In the former, we find concerns for the systematicity of mechanisms, culpable and nonculpable, working together as jointly sufficient conditions for ideology. And, as we pointed out earlier, this systematicity is found only when we analyze structures and their ideologies from the perspective of the group. Not all of these mechanisms are relevant in the latter project of our blaming practices: we are concerned only with those mechanisms that were salient for the individual agent in question, such that they would be blamed or exempted accordingly. That preference-adaptation might have been a salient mechanism for one individual under a given case of false consciousness does not mean that it was so for another. Webb, for example, in addition to noting that she did not suffer the “disabilities assumed to arise from her sex,” pointed out that she was in a better socioeconomic position than men as a “writer on economic questions” (Webb 1929, 355). To maintain otherwise would be to return to the aforementioned mereological problem, confusing characterizations of entire groups with individuals.

My approach to the question of whether the women antisuffragists were blameworthy differs from a number of other approaches that have been put forward recently to the question of moral blame in similar cases of systematic social ignorance: forward-oriented responsibility and extended blame. These, it would seem, are otherwise promising ways to approach the question of responsibility in cases of false consciousness.

References to Iris Marion Young's “social connection model” of responsibility has been gaining a fair bit of traction recently among some social philosophers as a way to avoid the trappings of attributing fault to an individual for structural effects (Young 2011). That is, such responsibility is “politically assigned rather than discovered” and “potentially grounded in factors other than moral desert or causing harm” (Zheng 2018, 4; see also Fricker 2007; Medina 2013; Jugov and Ypi 2019). But though this might be a fruitful way forward in terms of the ameliorative task of the critical project, this also notably avoids the notion of blameworthiness entirely, and its attendant moral sentiments in the ordinary cases.

Another notion of blame also gaining traction is grounded in expectations for agents to take responsibility for their actions, independent of whether they committed a fault (see, for example, Fricker 2016a; Aragon and Jaggar 2018; Bagnoli 2018; Calhoun 2019). Elinor Mason calls this “extended blame,” inasmuch as we “voluntarily extend our responsibility zone in order to secure the respect and trust of others, and as a way of showing commitment and investment in our relationships” (Mason 2019, 185). It would no doubt seem reasonable to expect the antisuffragists to take responsibility for having signed the Appeal. For some, there might be a question as to how much this would be distinct from the former, forward-oriented notion of responsibility (for example, Fricker 2016a), but in either case it does not involve the full range of moral sentiments relevant to ordinary blameworthiness.

I have argued from a careful consideration of the women of the Appeal that an agent may, in fact, be ordinarily blameworthy under false consciousness. However, to conclude, it should be underscored that despite this, it would be not only intellectually presumptuous but morally pernicious to move straightforwardly from this to the claim that we should blame them or that any act of blaming in similar cases is fully justified. An act of blame does not involve merely the blameworthiness of its recipient but also other crucial aspects such as the aim of blame or one's standing to enact it. The ethics of blame requires that we take into account the justificatory conditions of these other aspects: failing to do so might risk redoubling any harm that might have already satisfied the deterrent purpose of blame or even reinforcing oppressive institutional norms, if blame is performed publicly (cf. Snow 1994; Matthews 2014; Engen 2020).³¹ Until we take all of these into account, we cannot fully assess the justifiability of blaming even in cases like the blameworthy women of the Appeal.