Mara Marin’s "Connected by Commitment" (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

In this book, Mara Marin argues that the demands made on us by the injustice of intersecting structures of gender, racial and economic oppression cannot be captured by traditional concepts of obligation. We need to supplement these traditional concepts with a notion she calls “commitment.” A commitment is a relationship of obligations developed over time through the accumulated effect of open-ended actions and responses. In commitments agents incur obligations in virtue of their actions but without knowing in advance the precise content of their obligations. In structural contexts, “commitment” highlights the fact that we incur obligations to dismantle unjust structures in virtue of our participation in them over time, in virtue, that is, of the cumulative effects of our actions, irrespective of our intentions. The book offers an analysis of social relations as a form of commitment by analyzing three sorts of social relations vulnerable to oppression: political-legal relations, intimate relations of care, and labor relations. It argues that in each of these spheres oppressive relations are maintained through processes that make a mutual vulnerability invisible and in so doing are able to place it disproportionately on disadvantaged social groups.
Commitment is crucial for understanding how these processes can be undermined and oppressive structures can be transformed because it makes visible how the cumulative effects of individual actions are implicated in sustaining oppressive structures. Commitment is also essential to making sense of our collective obligations to transform oppression, thus offering a model of solidarity against multiple forms of oppression. Thus, understanding legal relations as commitments makes visible the continuous labor of compliance required by the law from those it governs. This view of legal relations highlights both the unequal burdens the law puts on different social groups and the possibilities of resisting illegitimate laws that are intrinsic to the enforcement function of the law. Similarly, understanding labor and care relations as commitments makes visible the processes through which the labor of women and racialized bodies are delegitimized and devalued, processes that are implicated in sustaining the hierarchical division between high-skilled and low-skilled labor, a division that contributes to increased rates of capitalist accumulation and social inequality.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 3: NORMATIVE POLITICAL THEORY

Chair

• Jennifer Nedelsky University of Toronto

Presenters

• Alyssa Battistoni Yale University

• Michaele L. Ferguson University of Colorado, Boulder

• Margaret Kohn University of Toronto

• Jennifer Nedelsky University of Toronto

• Joan C. Tronto University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Linda M.G. Zerilli University of Chicago

• Mara Marin University of Toronto