Lea Ypi: On Dominated Dominators

Colloquium lecture by Lea Ypi (LSE London), organized by the Department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy

This paper explores the case of dominated dominators as a way of understanding structural domination. I suggest that structural domination, the domination from which dominators suffer (over and above the dominated) is a particularly pernicious form of interference, which ought to worry us more than the agential and intersubjective forms of domination that we have been so far mostly concerned with. I argue that structural domination generates alienation (of both dominators and dominated) and show how alienation is a moral wrong of a distinctive kind which vindicates the distinctive wrong of structural domination. I conclude by discussing some objections and showing that if the most hideous instances of agential domination are in fact secondary wrongs, wrongs that inherit their wrongness from the primary wrong of domination by structures, this has important implications for resistance, in particular class-based analysis of resistance.