Unfreedom for All: How the World's Injustices Harm You

It is often said that we live under systems of injustice. But if so, who ought to combat them, and why? Many in the world's liberal elite hold that only the perpetrators or the victims have such duties, because of their special connections to the injustice. Others hold that all of the privileged have them, because they have duties to relieve suffering or to redress their complicity in the injustice. This book challenges those answers. It argues that everyone living under such injustices ought to combat them: victim, perpetrator, and bystander alike. Moreover, they all have the same reason for doing so: such injustices suppress everyone's resistance to their workings. But there is a name for such suppression: "authoritarianism." Hence such injustices make everyone unfree, because they subject everyone to authoritarian tactics. The book thus reinterprets and defends a core doctrine of the global left, "No one is free while others are oppressed!" For it shows how oppression subjects everyone--including you--to arbitrary power. The book argues that systematic injustice occurs when one group finds that its political voice is unjustly marginalized, its members exploited and subject to systematic violence, and that society's dominant norms unjustly favor a privileged group. It diagnoses three global injustices of this kind: gender, race, and poverty. It then shows how such injustices always suppress everyone's resistance to them, making everyone unfree. But if so, it argues, then this shared unfreedom should be the ground on which victims, bystanders, and perpetrators unite in solidarity against injustice.

About the Author :
Thomas J. Donahue-Ochoa is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Haverford College. He has published articles on the ethics of terrorism and the Earth, and on philosophical methods.

Review :
Donahue brings fresh insights to normative global justice debates. Arguing that unjust social and political structures make everyone unfree in myriad, insidious ways, Donahue shows why the moral case for opposing global inequalities and harms need not depend on ineffective appeals to charity or the elusive prospect of global class struggle. Instead, the inescapably subjugating effects of systems of exploitation and domination-even for putatively free citizens of liberal democracies-may supply a central and hitherto missing piece of the moral motivational puzzle In this wide-ranging book, Donahue seeks grounding for the old idea that while anyone is oppressed, no one is free. He finds it in the argument that structural injustice subjects us all to arbitrary power. Ambitious in scope and carefully argued, Unfreedom for All marks a significant contribution to the philosophical literature on oppression. Unfreedom for All offers a compelling diagnosis of contemporary global injustices and prescriptions for overcoming them. Assuming only the familiar libertarian notion of negative freedom, Donahue powerfully shows that oppression harms us all; it is literally true that 'no one is free unless everyone is free'. Hence we all have reason to struggle for emancipation. Deeply insightful, this book should reset the terms of debate in normative political theory. It is also beautifully written and accessible. A tour de force