Ashwini Vasanthakumar – Appreciating your worth: victims’ duties to repair their self-respect

Le département de philosophie de l’UQAM a le plaisir d’accueillir la professeure Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen’s University) qui présentera une conférence intitulée « Appreciating your worth: victims’ duties to repair their self-respect ».

Date : Vendredi 27 janvier, de 15h à 17h

Lieu : salle W-5215 de l’UQAM

Résumé: Victims of normalised oppression react to their oppression through denial, acquiescence, resignation, opportunism, subversion, anger, violence, and resistance; they respond instinctively, strategically, and inconsistently; they sometimes destroy one another out of spite or self-interest and other times come together in hope and commiseration. These responses do not take place in a moral vacuum. On the contrary. Victims remain moral agents under oppression, with all that entails, and their responses to their oppression are governed by moral reasons. Certainly, victims engage in rich moral practices of reflection and deliberation, of aid and resistance, and of accountability, argument and blame.
In this chapter, I explore what victims’ self-respect requires of them. Others have argued that victims’ self-respect requires that they resist their oppression or protest their mistreatment. I argue that victims have a duty to repair their self-respect. I define self-respect as a robust appreciation of one’s worth; argue that self-respect can generate duties; outline the ways in which normalised oppression undermines victims’ self-respect; and then elaborate on the different mechanisms of repair victims ought to undertake. I conclude with reflections on the relational nature of self-respect and of repairing self-respect, and of how duties of self-respect relate to victims’ other duties of assistance and justice.

Pour plus d’informations, veuillez SVP contacter Mauro Rossi (UQAM) à rossi.mauro@uqam.ca.