Abstract

In this dissertation, I present a social status conception of agency and argue that if it is an adequate conception, then oppression ought to be understood as a harm to agency rather than a harm to agents. On my view, traditional accounts of agency, which understand it as freedom of the will or freedom of action or the ability to choose authentically, misrepresent agency as individualistic when it is better understood as a socially conferred status. ;In Chapter 1, I describe what is meant by 'agency' in the philosophical sense, and argue that traditional thinking on oppression assumes that oppressed individuals are agents, in the traditional sense, who suffer harms. I argue that this assumption makes it difficult to understand how oppression can actually inhibit free action while also understanding how resistance to oppression remains possible. ;In Chapter 2, I explain the way in which a social status account of agency depends upon the insights of social pragmatism, and argue that a robustly normative form of pragmatism is a necessary underpinning for a social status conception of agency. In particular, I argue that historicist and conventionalist notions of the normative are insufficient bases for a social status conception of agency and argue in favor of more rationalistic or Hegelian historicist notions of the normative. ;In Chapter 3, I describe a social status conception of agency as dependent upon the notion that authority to engage in a social practice is conferred through mutual recognition, or the reciprocal conferral of status. I argue that mutual recognition of the sort G. W. F. Hegel develops must be supplemented with a more practical analysis of the sorts of practices by means of which agency is conferred such as the analysis Axel Honneth provides, which divides recognitive practices into three categories: emotional recognition, legal recognition and recognition within a community of value. ;In Chapter 4, I explain the practical implications of a social status account of agency both in general and specifically as regards accounts of oppression. On a social status account of agency, agency emerges as admitting of degrees, and as dependent upon the justifiability of practices of conferring status