Paths to Alienation

We can feel alienated from a perception of another person when we suspect we are somehow failing to perceive that person properly. The connection of alienation to moral self-reproach is easy to see in such cases. But it is also possible to be alienated from experiences of non-human targets, such as buildings or natural landscapes. And it turns out moral self-reproach plays a role in those cases, too. Exploring experiences of non-human targets helps reveal how we can be alienated from experiences in which we aren’t, strictly speaking, misperceiving the target of our experience at all. It also helps clarify the role of distinctively moral self-reproach, as against self-reproach of other types, in driving alienation.

Self-Control

Some philosophers distinguish between judgmental control (or rational control) and merely managerial self-control—particularly with respect to our control of our mental states. States like desire are normatively supposed to disappear whenever we sincerely endorse judgments in tension with them. (I am not supposed to continue wanting to smoke after I sincerely judge smoking to be bad for me.) When such states prove recalcitrant—when they resist judgmental control—we can apply to ourselves methods that also work when we use them on others. However, some forms of merely managerial control are also essentially first-personal in character. Investigating their first-personal character explains why some experiences can feel alien to us in the way some of our desires can—even though we don’t usually expect that our experiences will bend to our judgments.

Alien Experience

Some philosophers argue that our attitudes and emotions directly express our agency (so that we are responsible for them or enjoy distinctive first-person authority with respect to them). Proponents and critics of agency-in-the-attitudes accounts assume that experiences couldn’t fit any of the available models of agency-in-mental-life. But many perceptions and sensations contain content that subjects can endorse or regret. In cases involving certain kinds of fatigue, and in cases where subjects suspect they harbor tacit bias, subjects feel alienated from experiences whose content they partially reject. This chapter makes the case that these episodes of alienation deserve theoretical attention, and suggests that the relevant set of alienable experiences is marked by subjects’ suspicion that a morally improved version of themselves would not be having the relevant experiences.

Conclusion

There are some forms of cruelty, injustice, or simple unkindness that we can’t help but notice. That they are cruel, unjust, or unkind is clear to everyone: to their sometimes gleeful perpetrators, to those wounded by them, and to everyone else in the vicinity. But there are forms of cruelty and injustice that are not like this. Some forms of racialized harassment, and some forms of sexual violence, are easy to conceal—in the sense that anyone not directly targeted by them can find a way not to notice them. Sometimes, that not-noticing is active and culpable. Sometimes it isn’t. Either way, the shock and dismay of a White person coming to grips with the power and depth of racism in her community, or the shock and dismay of a man coming to grips with the extent of sexual violence in his community, can be off-putting. The news isn’t shocking to the people who’d been struggling all along. Someone who has long been aware of the contours of the problem may look on in bemused frustration as the newly shocked manage to secure attention—from peers, the press, perhaps policymakers—that had somehow been in short supply before....

Consequences for Philosophy of Perception

If experiences are alienable, it is impossible for philosophers of perception to embrace a particular form of naïve realism. Naïve realism is the appealing view that in perception we are perceptually related to objects and properties in the world. But anyone acknowledging alien experiences of the bias-driven kind will find a full embrace of naïve realism challenging. The strongest form of naïve realism, austere relationalism, rejects any explanatory role for representations. But with respect to the kinds of experiences from which we might most often feel alienation, austere relationalists are forced into an untenable position. In order to account for ways racist and sexist bias could affect perception, we should therefore adopt a hybrid of naïve realism and representationalism.

The Forensic Approach to Experience

If experiences are alienable, then it must be possible for them to be influenced by aspects of ourselves toward which we might take a critical attitude. This requires that beliefs, biases, emotions, and fatigue can influence our experiences. This chapter explores several pathways through which such influence could travel, and argues that it can and does occur. To establish such influence, it is not necessary to prove that cognitive activity penetrates early perceptual processing. It is also unnecessary, when considering the effects of bias on experience, to assume that every aspect of current research on tacit bias will be fully vindicated. The claim that some experiences are alienable is not hostage to either of these particular empirical questions.