Truth-Telling and Oppression

• In Event: Truth and Force

Abstract

Recent accounts claim that the specific wrong of oppression consists either in a limitation of freedom or agency, or in an affront to equality or fairness. In this paper, I suggest a different approach, one that focuses on the double-bind that oppressed agents experience when they are asked to "tell the truth" about themselves or their situation. Drawing from the works of Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault, I show that a specific feature of oppressive situations consists in transforming truth claims into tools that reinforce oppression itself. I then argue that this feature can be construed as a specific wrong, at once epistemic, ethical, and political, which systematically accompanies other wrongs in situations of oppression, such as the limitation of the agent's freedom or the affront made to equality. I conclude by emphasizing the relatively undertheorized but crucial role of lying as a strategy for disrupting the epistemic, ethical, and political mechanisms at work in oppressive situations.

Author

• Daniele Lorenzini, University of Pennsylvania