“When men practice integrity, they accept that part of the work of wholeness is learning to be flexible, learning how to negotiate, how to embrace change in thought and action. The ability to change is the condition of being that makes us capable of responsibility…This is true freedom.”
-bell hooks, The Will to Change
The loss of agency can tell us a story about the moral obligations one may fail to meet and, seemingly, also a story about who one is and what state they are in when making morally questionable decisions such as lying, becoming violent, or stealing. This story about agency is especially relevant when considering the amount of people in the United States who are incarcerated for severe moral wrongdoings, the vast majority of which are male. However, it is difficult to know what makes people lose their agency without thinking about what constitutes their agency in the first place. Additionally, without proper descriptions of agency, it becomes even more difficult to raise the question about how one can possibly re-constitute their agency—that is, regain control over the way one makes decisions and acts on those decisions. Fortunately, the discourse around moral agency within the Kantian tradition provides us with a strong account of moral agency, but it does not describe instances in which a person who has lost control of their agency can re-constitute it. In this piece, I argue that a Kantian perspective would benefit from Black feminist literature, specifically bell hooks’ work to create an account of how agency can be re-constituted.
Drawing heavily from Kant, Christine Korsgaard, in her essay “The Normative Constitution of Agency,” describes one of the most intricate and profound models of agency that offers us an understanding of its basic features. For instance, an essential feature of agency is unity, as it plays a role in how people, as agents, conform themselves to certain norms whenever they make decisions for their actions.1 For her, the decisions that a person makes should depend on an endorsement with the unification between their reason and the good moral norms they should follow. Put simply, an individual’s agency is normatively constituted.
Because Korsgaard’s account does not describe the possibility of the re-constitution of agency, hooks’ description of how men who essentially experience a loss of agency within the context of patriarchal culture could regain their agency would be advantageous for Korsgaard’s account. In these examples, hooks theorizes critical notions that could be implemented into Korsgaard’s model of agency, which can open up a pathway for addressing the crisis of loss of agency in incarcerated populations.
Foremost, however, we must become clear about the advantages of Korsgaard’s intricate model of agency. This model presents several characteristic implications about who we take to be a normatively constituted agent. The first implication relates to what has already been mentioned about how essential it is for an agent to be unified. Particularly, what needs to be unified is an individual’s structures of practical reason because it gives one the ability to become self-aware of one’s intentions and how they affect one’s actions.2 As rational beings, by consciously negotiating between our own inclinations, attitudes, and the actions which we deem moral, we can arrive at a unified self-consciousness where we can figure out the optimal course of action to take depending on the situation, we find ourselves in.
In order for an agent to be unified, it follows that they must overcome disunity before they act. Surprisingly, however, Korsgaard mentions very little about how an individual may accomplish this. When discussing situations in which our rationality may go astray, she tells us, “When we become aware that we are representing the world to ourselves…there is a way in which our experience loses its unity…it is up to us to put ourselves back together into unified agents.”3 Although it is unclear what Korsgaard believes an individual should do to ‘put themselves together,’ it is clear that if one’s reason is not unified, they risk acting immorally.
After all, choosing a morally good course of action depends on exercising reason properly and thus adopting optimal norms, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and desires. Accordingly, morally good actions are more agential than morally bad actions. It is worth stating here that Korsgaard’s philosophical influences are evident in this component of her argument, as Kant’s moral theories suppose this kind of unity. That is, for Kant, there should not be disunity between reason and self-love if one aspires to be a good (moral) decision-maker. Crucially, an agent has the rational capacity to make laws that can govern their actions, allowing them to put selfish desires aside. Korsgaard deviates from Kant’s theory by not focusing on explaining how agents make laws but that agents have the self-determination to adopt certain laws or principles to govern their actions.4
The content of these moral principles is simply more important. By actively constituting principles of action, an agent subsequently constitutes their identity, for they are deciding what person they want to be. In this way, an individual may be held morally responsible for their actions and attitudes. Contrarily to this ideal picture of agency, Korsgaard presents disunified individuals as people without reason, self-consciousness, and consequently without the ability to understand themselves and the world around them. Only a rational agent, an active knower, can note the normative disunity of the world. Consequently, under this framework, we get a despairing picture of whether an irrational individual can come to note and overcome normative disunity so that he may act morally.
Although Korsgaard gives us a clearer picture of what moral agency is, one may ask: is this the hopelessness we should have for people who wind up in prison with a shattered moral agency? Should we concede that people with a shattered moral agency are condemned to fail to act morally? Or is it possible that their damaged agency could still be repaired?
We often refer to morally questionable people as ‘not being in their right mind’ and ‘needing to get themselves together.’ But how, exactly, can people recover from such a state, and what does this process look like? It is at this point that we can take bell hooks’ feminist notions in her book, The Will to Change, seriously.
As a feminist who examined the consequences of a patriarchal culture, hooks is one of the few scholars who writes extensively on the ways men experience a loss of agency due to this culture. For hooks, the patriarchy has maintained its power over marginalized men’s lives, assaulting their spirits and hindering them from knowing themselves; its culture can be emotionally abusive as it requires most men to surrender their capacity to be ‘whole’ as they learn to wear a mask to conform to certain sexist behaviors from a young age.5 Wholeness, to hooks, consists of having an undivided soul without a split sense of self and by which a true self, a personal identity, can emerge. But, when young boys socialized in a patriarchal ideal are not allowed to express their emotions because they cannot deviate from hypermasculine behaviors, they betray their potential to become a more authentic representation of themselves.
The result of adopting a hypermasculine patriarchal culture is that men don a false self and experience what hooks calls soul murder—the psychological crushing of the male spirit.6 Essentially, hooks suggests that men fail to become self-determining agents responsible for their choices in many areas of their lives. Incorporating Korsgaard’s words here, soul murder appears to generate disunification of reason and self-esteem (or, as Kant would say, self-love). Korsgaard and hooks—without referencing each other’s work or even sharing direct references—describe the loss of agency in an incredibly similar way.
Yet, unlike Korsgaard, hooks posits a helpful notion—integrity—that allows us to see a pathway towards the re-constitution of one’s agency. For hooks, it is imperative that men (or anyone who has internalized patriarchal norms) go on a quest for integrity to regain the healthy self-esteem and self-love necessary for adopting new moral norms and ways of being. Integrity, in this context, is the practice that involves recovering all the parts of the self that were previously abandoned in serving the expectations imposed by patriarchal culture.7 For men to undo the damages of “soul murder,” they must confront their past trauma and actively choose to live authentically, outside of gendered expectations. This process, hooks firmly argues, is possible through an engagement with the feminist thought that women use to eradicate ideologies of domination, including those that are intrinsic to Western patriarchal culture.
Feminism, as hooks famously describes, is a struggle, a movement to end sexist oppression.8 Crucially, because this movement is meant to direct our attention to all systems of domination and the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class, oppression, it does not privilege women over men. In fact, feminism offers a way for men to practice integrity by offering strategies of transformation. Because feminist politics are established by a community, men can begin this quest by using the visionary works of feminists.
For instance, hooks explicitly encourages Black men to consider Black feminist work as Black women have fought for their own right to self-definition against the negative stereotypes perpetuated in a sexist and racist culture. hooks specifically speaks to Black men in the United States because she argues they are some of the most feared and least loved people in a imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture.9 This culture, she claims, has smothered the self-love Black men could have for themselves, which has, in turn, damaged their agency. However, men can learn to redefine masculinity and their identities by taking up similar feminist practices. As the feminist movement did for women, men can build and rely on a community to advance in their journey towards integrity, as an empowering community can facilitate them in becoming self-conscious of the ways their previous norms have damaged their agency.
In this manner, men can recover their true selves—that is, the self who does not feel the need to conform to patriarchal norms—and unite the different parts of their character so that there is no split in their soul. Moreover, men can become accountable to a community and themselves, and they may learn that lying, being violent, etc., would be a way of evading moral responsibility and betraying their newly found identity. In fact, in some prison rehabilitation spaces, feminism has already been used in this way. Philosophically speaking, I believe we can now readily imagine the re-constitution of agency.
I want readers to know that I decided to put these two thinkers in conversation with one another because, through their work, we can have more hope toward people we may consider irredeemable non-agents. As philosophers, we can do this by not being solely invested in the origins of agency but rather being invested in where we, as humans, especially those marginalized to the fringes of society, go wrong and why we do. Stated bluntly, considering Black feminist discourse on agency is critical for theorizing the re-constitution of agency. This would enrich traditional philosophical discourse on moral agency but, more importantly, help us learn how we can navigate the world together.
Mariana Gomez is a Ph.D. philosophy student studying decolonial thought, women of color feminism, and phenomenology at Georgetown University.
