In this thesis I argue that we should think of human flourishing in terms of the development of human capacities and that we should understand oppression in terms of the structural obstacles to such development. My overarching aim is to bring the analysis and critique back together by showing that thinking more carefully about well-being can help us think better about the web of interrelated psycho-social and political phenomena such as internalised oppression, personal autonomy, structural oppression, and ideology. My arguments thus contribute to a broader discussion on the nature of justice by providing an analytic normative framework for the critical theory of oppression.
The thesis consists of three parts. In the first part, I argue against the prevailing theory of subjective well-being in moral philosophy and in public policy, by subjecting to critical analysis its philosophical foundations. I then defend an objective developmental theory of well-being that can be traced to an idea of Eudaimonia. I argue that we flourish because we realise a range of human capacities rather than because we satisfy our preferences or experience positive mental responses. I propose to understand well-being in terms of self-development – as a process of development of one’s human capacities in the pursuit of one’s projects for their own sake. I answer some of the most important objections to the proposed view.
In the second part, I start with problematising the phenomenon of internalised oppression – or adaptive preferences – in such a way as to show its key relevance for a successful theory of oppression and personal autonomy. I discuss various theories of adaptive preferences, but find them unsatisfactory, proposing a developmental view that improves our understanding of this phenomenon. I argue that adaptive preferences should be defined by their inconsistency with human flourishing and their causal relationship to flourishing-incompatible formative conditions. I introduce the notion of structurally imposed constraining preferences to signal what I think is normatively important in cases of internalised oppression, namely the material conditions of class-divided social systems that thwart the universal and free realisation of people’s developmental capacities.
In the third part, I call for a widening of our analytic tools to include the theory of subjectivation, critical phenomenology, and ideology critique. I claim that constraining preferences represent a form of internalised enclosure, a distinct type of psychic and corporeal oppression that thwarts well-being understood as self-development. I then argue that this is a form of structural oppression because it affects individuals depending on how they are structurally positioned in a society. To fully understand the mechanism of perpetuation of such structural oppression I suggest that we need an account of ideology that focuses on the habitus of agents rather than on distorted cognitive beliefs. I then propose a concept of ideology as a practice encoded into cognitive and corporeal responses to the world; it stabilises oppression by erasing its effects through the creation of distinctive life-worlds that constrain the horizon of one’s well-being. I think that highlighting this dimension of oppression clarifies the goals of emancipatory struggles.
Azizjon Bagadirov is a Hannah Arendt Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI). His research focuses on the normative frameworks of equality and justice.