Episode 114: Sally Haslanger discusses ideology

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What is the basic definition of ideology according to Sally Haslanger?

Matt Teichman 0:19

Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I'm Matt Tykman.

Unknown 0:22

And I'm Emily Dupree.

Matt Teichman 0:24

With us today is Sally Haslinger. Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And she's here to discuss ideology. Sally Haslinger, welcome.

Sally Haslanger 0:36

Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here.

Matt Teichman 0:40

Okay, so the term ideology is one that I think comes up now and again in like sort of you know everyday conversations. But it also is a little bit of a kind of obscure academic word. So w what would be an example of like an ideology so we can like kind of feel our way into it?

Sally Haslanger 0:56

Well, I think that a common understanding of ideology is it's a set of beliefs or um a broad kind of social agreement about uh background ideas that justify social practices. So I think that nowadays people are likely to think that racism is an ideology And by that they mean that people who are racist have a set of beliefs that think that people of color are inferior or more prone to violence or lazy or whatever it might be. And that these beliefs have the role of an ideology because they're broadly accepted or accepted by at least some significant population, and that then they justify certain kinds of behaviors toward people of that group. So that would be one way of thinking about an ideology. So you might, for example, suggest that when there is

Sally Haslanger 1:54

discrimination in employment or discrimination in schooling or education or policing. that this is due to ideology, so it might be a gender ideology, that women belong in the home or that women aren't as analytically acute. Those are ideological beliefs that people have that prevent women from being successful in math, science, engineering. Or it could be a racist ideology that says, you know, people of color are not as good at certain kinds of skills, etcetera, and so it prevents them from being uh hired. Or it could be, again, in policing, that black people are more violent or more prone to violence and so they need to be treated more roughly or more aggressively.

Matt Teichman 2:44

And one salient feature I think of the two examples you just mentioned is that these beliefs I think most people would find them pretty offensive. Like these are bad beliefs to have. Is an ideology always bad?

Sally Haslanger 2:55

So there are different traditions in the history of work on ideology. So on one conception of ideology, ideology is bad. It's a pejorative use of the term. And so an ideology is a system of beliefs, say, that sustains injustice or that seems to justify what most people would consider unjust actions or unjust policies. Uh there's another use of the term in which idea everything is ideology, right? Whatever we believe, it's ideological because ideology is what makes possible social relations. It's what we rely on when we are interacting with each other, some kind of background social assumptions or understandings. So I've chosen to use the term ideology in the pejorative sense and I'm not suggesting that one is the right one and one is the wrong one, but I've chose to use ideology in the pejorative sense because I'm interested in something called ideological oppression.

Sally Haslanger 4:03

So I like to draw a distinction between repression where there are systems that are coercive and force people to behave in certain ways against their will. So you might think of police brutality as repressive, obviously slavery was a repressive. There are a variety of other institutions that are repressive. But ideological oppression is different. Because ideological oppression is a form of oppression that the oppressed participate in willingly. So I think a paradigm example of ideological oppression is gender oppression. So most women value their social role and they take the gender division of labor to be perfectly acceptable. Even though the gender division of labor I think is unjust and unfair and places

Sally Haslanger 4:52

Exceptional burdens on women. Енсо, а тим да вонки або інститут. is in terms of repression. But another way of thinking about injustice is that you get people to participate in unjust practices and unjust structures.