Domination without Inequality? Mutual Domination, Republicanism, and Gun Control

Power inequalities often lead to domination. Slaveholders dominate slaves, powerful capitalists dominate their wage laborers, men in patriarchal societies dominate their wives, colonialists dominate colonized peoples, and so on. Such cases are the bread and butter of republicanism. On the republican...

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Veröffentlicht in:Philosophy & public affairs 2018-04, Vol.46 (2), p.175-206
1. Verfasser: Schmidt, Andreas T.
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Power inequalities often lead to domination. Slaveholders dominate slaves, powerful capitalists dominate their wage laborers, men in patriarchal societies dominate their wives, colonialists dominate colonized peoples, and so on. Such cases are the bread and butter of republicanism. On the republican conception, being a free person requires freedom from domination. But power inequalities often involve such domination and thereby make people unfree. However, while inequality is a central threat to republican freedom, I argue in this article that an exclusive focus on power inequalities is mistaken—a point often missed in current debates. Republicanism is not an exclusively egalitarian theory. In cases of what I call mutual domination, agents hold roughly equal power over each other but still precariously depend on each other's will. And this can be so, even if such equal power is subject to substantial reciprocal control. Through various examples, including collective unfreedom, nuclear deterrence, data privacy, and others, I show how mutual domination draws our attention to normatively troubling cases. Such cases instantiate what republicans think is objectionable about dependence and domination, both noninstrumentally and instrumentally. Despite power being distributed equally, mutual domination can involve significant pressures for ingratiation, increase vulnerability, and throw one into undesirable power relations. Conversely, removing mutual domination can come with subjective and intersubjective benefits, such as reducing vulnerability and empowering agents to determine the kinds of social relationships they wish to enter and sustain. I also show how this analysis gives republicanism a comparative advantage over alternative, purely egalitarian theories. Unlike relational egalitarianism, republicanism helps us identify cases of mutual domination, brings out what makes them problematic and suggests ways to tackle them. Mutual domination highlights an important way in which independence stands as a genuinely different and attractive ideal. Practically, mutual domination shows that republican institutions should sometimes aim to abolish or reduce power rather than equalize it or intensify its reciprocal control. As a case study, I discuss gun control. If we focused narrowly on equalizing and reciprocally controlling power, this would give us reason for equal widespread gun ownership. However, widespread gun ownership involves mutual domination, such that m
ISSN:0048-3915
1088-4963
DOI:10.1111/papa.12119