Resistance and Racism: On Moral Psychology and Moral Incentive in Nonideal Circumstances

Abstract

A Kantian reconstruction of racialized moral psychology can illuminate the late Charles Mills’s account of white complicity. Unfortunately, philosophers have comparatively less to say about the incentive structure of the oppressed to participate in the systems that oppress them. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, this article argues that the oppressed might participate in injustice out of a misguided sense of self-respect that rationalizes their disregard of the unmet claims of fellow oppressed people. Self-respect gone too far is, in effect, the normative basis of Du Bois’s critique of the black middle class’s failure to forge intragroup black political solidarity.