Burdening the Burdened Virtues

Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles is a distinct and significant contribution to the feminist project of describing and analyzing oppression. Tessman is courageous in her willingness to confront topics that are tough to face and open to misinterpretation and mishandling. The result is a much needed questioning of assumptions about the “good life” and a brutally honest approach to the damaging effects of oppression not only on those who endure it and those who resist or challenge it but also on those who perpetuate it. My tactic will be to applaud the goals of the project at the same time as I explore its implications for areas of philosophical inquiry that shape my own work: understanding oppression and liberatory struggle in the contemporary context of factors such as cultural differences and economic globalization. To do this, I focus on Tessman’s discussion of human flourishing and of the burdened virtue of sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering. I follow Tessman in arguing that we need to place a discussion of these in our world of great injustice and enormous suffering, but I add to her account of burdens and hardships those that emerge in our global context of the omnipresent and normative influence of powerful countries, international organizations, financial institutions, multinational corporations, and neoliberal policies. I want to argue that this context further burdens the burdened virtue of sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering by calling on us to reflect critically on our role in perpetuating forms of oppression created by these global forces.

Tessman positions her work within the broader discussion of moral conflict: the idea that choosing what is best can leave a “residue” or “remainder” of regret, anguish, or anger over what was opted against. However, Tessman is interested in a specific kind of moral conflict, that which occurs in the “context of oppression and of the liberatory struggles that take place against oppression” (3). It is important to keep this context in mind because without it, it is all too easy to try to fit what Tessman says about the burdened virtues into a more generalized account of virtues in the idealized circumstances of personal relationships, families, and cohesive groups. The point is that virtues such as loyalty and sensitivity to others may not be burdensome or may display different sorts of burdens when the background conditions are favorable. Tessman’s focus, then, is on the limits to and burdens on moral goodness under adverse conditions of oppression, “where the external or background conditions necessary for flourishing will tend to be lacking or diminished” (159). This focus on the moral state of selves under adverse conditions of oppression makes it appropriate for Tessman to turn to virtue ethics, a “tradition of ethical theory that is agent-centered and that foregrounds questions of character” (3).

Tessman is well aware of drawbacks to using virtue ethics to discuss oppression. First, Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics requires a good deal of critique and revision to make it suited to feminist or other liberatory struggles. Second, a focus on limits and burdens to selves who endure and resist oppression risks depicting an overwhelmingly pessimistic account of oppression and what can be done to survive let alone alleviate its effects on selves. On the first drawback, Tessman does what many feminists criticizing and utilizing traditional theorists do—identify insights in these accounts that can then be appropriated or deployed in new ways and for innovative liberatory purposes. On the second, Tessman admits that examining the moral damage done to and the hardships of those who endure and resist oppression may result in resigning oneself to the pointlessness of enduring, resisting, or struggling in the face of so much suffering in the world and of damage to the self.

Other theorists reject a stance of resignation by advocating strategies for alleviating or eliminating conditions of oppression. But Tessman makes it clear from the beginning that her project is not about analyzing oppressive social practices and institutions or advocating policies for changing them. Instead, this is the assumed background against which she uncovers the hardship and damage...