Personal Growth, Oppression, and Thinking With the Mind of Another: A Case for Transformative Moral Testimony

It is a controversial question whether moral testimony is permissible or whether agency based on the judgment of others can ever be full-fledged moral agency. Some authors argue that moral judgments acquired by testimony have a deficit in autonomy and authenticity, or that they are not well understood and thus lack important moral qualities.1 Others reject those arguments and argue that, sometimes, listening to others can be as good as arriving at moral judgments via one's own reasoning and intuition.2 A particularly tricky case is accepting testimony while being in circumstances of oppression, especially when suffering psychological oppression that comes with having one's rational or emotional capacities doubted or interpreted in a faulty and distorted way.3 Nicole Dular has argued that moral testimony under oppression is not recommendable because it tracks and thus perpetuates unjust status hierarchies.4 While I think the argument is powerful and the described risk serious, I believe that there is an especially strong case for relying on particular others in circumstances of psychological oppression, and that the risks outlined by Dular can be handled. I call this specific way of relying on another person “thinking with the mind of another”5 and will describe it as a type of evaluative reasoning in which a crucial part of the justificatory process is outsourced to another mind. By this procedure, people who feel a hindrance in endorsing a reason as normative at that moment can carry through with a practical conclusion that they may be able to endorse only at a later point. A concrete other who can give advice in such circumstances is especially important for people who cannot rely on their surrounding culture and tradition in general to give the right advice and interpretation. In such cases, I think that others can sometimes lend their mind to a psychologically oppressed and conflicted person to help her grow into a new and more autonomous self. To avoid Dular's objection, people accepting testimony in such circumstances need more than just deference to alleged authorities; they need a higher amount of critical reasoning and understanding of social roles and personalities. However, I argue that this can be more easily available and trainable, given the human capacity for connection and empathetic understanding, than a reasoning process freed from the effects of internalized negative stereotypes, deflated trust in one's own moral intuitions, gaslighting, epistemic coercion, or other forms of psychological and epistemic oppression. It may be of special importance to the one who suffers from the influence of psychological oppression to find the right other who serves as a source not only of knowledge but also of justificatory power. In Section 2, I start out with an example that illustrates how oppressive mechanisms can create a decisional predicament for an agent and how “thinking with the mind of another” can help her overcome it. I explain why Dular's worry about testimony under oppression is relevant, but also suggest that the worry underestimates the self-reflective capacities of many oppressed people. In the following section, I explore how “thinking with the mind of another” works and why it is of special importance for people who are psychologically impacted by oppression. In Section 3, I argue that outsourcing the evaluative judgment to a trusted other can provide psychologically oppressed people with the power to in of the oppressive mechanisms that I those outsourced judgments to the of to are and but give the power to and into an agent who can and endorse In Section I suggest that relying on the advice of another person the of and risks and which are especially strong for people with oppression. In Section I the question to which “thinking with the mind of another” can be with autonomy and to that this type of cannot be full-fledged agency. 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