Alexander Edlich and Alfred Archer – “Tightlacing and Abusive Normative Address”

In this post, Alexander Edlich and Alfred Archer discuss their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

When we interact with each other, we draw on assumptions about what the other is like. When I talk to someone, I assume they can understand me; when I ask them for help, I assume they are capable of helping; when I offer help, I assume it is in their interest. These assumptions are often neither explicit nor conscious, but they guide our interactions.

Likewise, when we act, we are influenced by assumptions about what we ourselves are like. I only get into the pool because I assume that I can swim; I go to bed early because I assume that I need a certain amount of sleep; I hesitate to run for a public office because I am unsure I can handle its pressures.

Our agency is thus deeply influenced by our conception of ourselves. This also holds for our moral agency. We may feel under a duty to help others because we assume not only that they need help but also that we are able to offer the help they need at no great cost to ourselves. Conversely, we think that others should help when we assume they are able to and it is not too demanding. Whether we think we have a certain duty, then, depends in part on what kind of people we understand ourselves to be, including what we understand our capacities to be and what we think will count as unduly burdensome for us. 

This makes us vulnerable to having our self-conceptions wrongfully distorted by others in ways that control how we think we should act. We call this kind of wrong “tightlacing”.

Tightlacing occurs when someone is subjected to influences that foreseeably distort their self-conception in a way that makes them have overburdening demands on themselves. This may come about in various ways, but moral address, and the assumptions it makes about its target, are a particularly useful vehicle for it. Consider two examples:

• Some parents want their children to suppress their emotions, especially where they are negative, and this can lead to emotional abuse. If normal episodes of, say, a child’s anger regularly elicit responses like “Keep your ridiculous anger to yourself”, “Why are you annoying us with this?”, or “Your mother/father is having such a hard time already, and now you’re being so unhelpful”, a moral demand is made that conveys an assumption about what the child is like. They are expected to be able to suppress their anger in order not to annoy their parents, and this conveys that their anger is something they should be in control of, and that managing it away has no cost to them.

• Survivors of political atrocities like the Holocaust are sometimes expected to overcome feelings of resentment to enable a society to move forward. Where they refuse to do so, they may find themselves accused of vengefulness and egoism. Their resentment is not treated as a proper emotional reaction to the horror they experienced, but as something they, in the interest of society, should be able to get rid of. This expectation, too, conveys a view of their emotional nature.

In these examples, people are addressed with moral demands based on the assumption that they can regulate their emotions away in order to benefit others without significant cost to themselves. Given the perceived authority of moral demands and the fact that these problematic assumptions are left implicit, this risks manipulating the moral addressees into accepting the view conveyed. If successful, this strategy induces in them a distorted view of themselves: for example, that they are beings with no significant affective nature, or at least with an affective nature that can be easily disposed of. As a consequence, they will tend not to view their emotions as a natural and integral part of themselves, and they will not recognise that emotion regulation can be a difficult and costly task. In short, their view of themselves might become distorted.

This tightlaces them: if someone is made to think their affective nature carries no weight and is easily managed away, they will make moral demands on themselves that are based on this assumption. Once manipulated into thinking that one’s anger has no significance, or that emotion regulation has no costs, these agents are likely to expect themselves to regulate their anger away even when doing so is in fact inappropriate. They will apply norms to themselves that appear to be justified but, given their actual nature, are in fact decidedly overburdening. Victims of tightlacing thus find themselves wearing a normative corset which does not fit what they are like.

We are not saying that tightlacing is the only form of wrongdoing occurring in these examples. Nor do we think that tightlacing only occurs in relation to managing feelings; it occurs whenever someone’s view of themselves is changed such that they apply overburdening demands to themselves. 

Tightlacing wrongs people in many ways: it is manipulative, it makes unreasonable demands, and it is likely harmful to its victims. But, in addition to this, there are two especially significant ways in which it is wrongful. First, by pressuring the victims into applying unreasonable demands to themselves, it denies their rights, and it makes them complicit in this denial. Second, it erases who they are and, again, makes them complicit in this erasure of who they are.

To sum up, our actions and interactions depend on our conception of what we and others are like. This makes us vulnerable not only to other people’s conception of us, but also to what they may do to alter our conception of ourselves. Not abiding by a distorted conception of ourselves, and not being tightlaced into unfitting norms, matters greatly to our lives and our freedom. To break free of unfitting normative corsets, we need to let go of such distorted conceptions. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4644/.

About the authors