Who we are and how we have been represented shape our assumptions about agential competence in both professional and public spheres.
Who we are and how we have been represented to the world shape assumptions about agential competence. These assumptions infiltrate our professional lives and our public lives as citizens. These assumptions emanate, in part, from asymmetries of power in the relations between agents, and from socially cultivated implicit bias relativized to gendered, economic, and ethnic social identity. The asymmetries operate on two dimensions: there are asymmetries of power in the relations between parties to responsibility practices, and there are asymmetries within responsibility practices. I am interested in exploring the effects of such asymmetries and biases upon the judgments we make of one another as credible interlocutors and as agents who are competent to be held, and to hold others, accountable for their actions in both professional and public sphere.
The practice of ascribing responsibility partners actors who have behaved in such a way that others may have some claim upon them: claims of justice, of duty, or of simple explanation. Most analyses of responsibility focus on the question of whether the presumed responsible party has satisfied some range of epistemic and control conditions. This focus ignores the status of the party positioned to hold another responsible, relative to that of the party from whom an account is expected. And, typically, scant attention is paid to the question of who decides upon standards of evidence for credibility: Who in the interlocutive community determines the worthiness of others to stake claims for accountability, and to lay charges of responsibility? Who determines whether a claim has merit? Who determines whether the terms of the practice—such as in providing an account of one’s actions that is meant to excuse or justify or explain—have been satisfactorily met?
These oversights are problematic, as they often mask malignancies in both dimensions of asymmetry. Because stereotypes of gender, race, religious affiliation, socio-economic upbringing, and physical ability carry heightened perceptions of agential incompetence, even legitimate asymmetries of power between parties to responsibility practices and asymmetries within responsibility practices can become malignant. Credible moral, legal, and practical agents and credible members of moral, legal, professional, and cultural communities may be denied due recognition respect. Efforts of self-representation may be undercut as well: one who is a credible responsible agent may be treated as less entitled to hold others accountable and to be held to certain standards of accountability.
In a professional context, disturbances to ordinary and useful asymmetries within responsibility practices occur when rightful authority is contested and proper conventions of accountability practice are abrogated. The culprit is the enhanced social power certain parties to the practice have come to expect as natural given their privileged racial, socio-economic, or gendered status. In the civic arena, notably in interactions with law enforcement, members of a stereotyped class might find their identity as a law-abiding agent preemptively denied, and their self-understanding as responsible partners in the enterprise of public life questioned. Recognizing one another as equal participants in the relationships definitive of a participatory democracy is essential to sustaining faith in the ideals of democracy. Being taken seriously as a competent interlocutive partner is a prerequisite to satisfying public interaction. A person who is susceptible to treatment that assumes of them lesser credibility is shortchanged in the possession of civil rights, in protection under the rule of law, and in access to practices of responsibility that are sincerely dialogical, just, and civil. In all, she is regarded as a less than fully capable participant in public life.