Personal Growth, Oppression, and Thinking With the Mind of Another: A Case for Transformative Moral Testimony

It is a controversial question whether moral testimony is permissible or whether agency based on the judgment of others can ever be full-fledged moral agency. Some authors argue that moral judgments acquired by testimony have a deficit in autonomy and authenticity, or that they are not well understood and thus lack important moral qualities.1 Others reject those arguments and argue that, sometimes, listening to others can be as good as arriving at moral judgments via one's own reasoning and intuition.2 A particularly tricky case is accepting testimony while being in circumstances of oppression, especially when suffering psychological oppression that comes with having one's rational or emotional capacities doubted or interpreted in a faulty and distorted way.3 Nicole Dular has argued that moral testimony under oppression is not recommendable because it tracks and thus perpetuates unjust status hierarchies.4 While I think the argument is powerful and the described risk serious, I believe that there is an especially strong case for relying on particular others in circumstances of psychological oppression, and that the risks outlined by Dular can be handled. I call this specific way of relying on another person "thinking with the mind of another"5 and will describe it as a type of evaluative reasoning in which a crucial part of the justificatory process is outsourced to another mind. By this procedure, people who feel a hindrance in endorsing a reason as normative at that moment can carry through with a practical conclusion that they may be able to endorse only at a later point. A concrete other who can give advice in such circumstances is especially important for people who cannot rely on their surrounding culture and tradition in general to give the right advice and interpretation. In such cases, I think that others can sometimes lend their mind to a psychologically oppressed and conflicted person to help her grow into a new and more autonomous self. To avoid Dular's objection, people accepting testimony in such circumstances need more than just deference to alleged authorities; they need a higher amount of critical reasoning and understanding of social roles and personalities. However, I argue that this can be more easily available and trainable, given the human capacity for connection and empathetic understanding, than a reasoning process freed from the effects of internalized negative stereotypes, deflated trust in one's own moral intuitions, gaslighting, epistemic coercion, or other forms of psychological and epistemic oppression. It may be of special importance to the one who suffers from the influence of psychological oppression to find the right other who serves as a source not only of knowledge but also of justificatory power. In Section 2, I start out with an example that illustrates how oppressive mechanisms can create a decisional predicament for an agent and how "thinking with the mind of another" can help her overcome it. I explain why Dular's worry about testimony under oppression is relevant, but also suggest that the worry underestimates the self-reflective capacities of many oppressed people. In the following section, I explore how "thinking with the mind of another" works and why it is of special importance for people who are psychologically impacted by oppression. In Section 3, I argue that outsourcing the evaluative judgment to a trusted other can provide psychologically oppressed people with the power to transform in spite of the oppressive mechanisms that hold them back. I compare those outsourced value judgments to the concept of proleptic reasons. According to Agnes Callard, proleptic reasons are insufficiently grasped and endorsed, but give the power to aspire and transform into an agent who can fully grasp and endorse them. In Section 4, I suggest that relying on the advice of another person helps shouldering the burden of responsibility and handling risks and pressures, which are especially strong for people living with oppression. In Section 5, I discuss the question to which degree "thinking with the mind of another" can be compatible with autonomy and respond to worries that this type of thinking cannot be full-fledged agency. In Section 6, I argue that the hurdles to identifying the right other are significant but possible to overcome. I suggest a few strategies that people can use to identify the right others and avoid tracking unjust status hierarchies. ABORTION Tessa is a pregnant teenager with poor mental health, lacking financial stability, a stable partnership, and family support. She considers an abortion because she first wants to gain more stability and realize a good educational opportunity that turned out for her. However, she also feels rooted in a traditional community life. She feels that, in general, she values family more than her individual career and could imagine having children at a later point in life. Although she sees many things speaking in favour of having the abortion in those circumstances, she feels egoistical and cold-hearted, because many people in her community ascribe those character traits to women having an abortion. The male priest in her community says it is evil for women to prioritize themselves over their children. Since Tessa does care for family and community values, this hits her especially hard. In addition, a biased doctor quotes one-sided studies according to which most women who abort suffer from permanent mental health damage and never recover or find a happy family life afterwards. Because of the strong pressure of oppressive mechanisms—stereotypical denigration of women, various techniques of gaslighting or misogyny, or epistemic injustice in medical research and consultation to name a few—young Tessa feels guilty about her wish to abort. The guilt and fear induced by the biased or stereotypical projections prevent her from drawing the conclusion that abortion could be permissible—and even the right option for her. Now, Tessa meets Barbara, a middle-aged woman active as a social worker, representing the same family and community values that Tessa cherishes, being a loving mother and not showing signs of egoism or cold-heartedness. Barbara says that she considers abortion a sensible choice in Tessa's situation and believes that the education she was planning to pursue will make her a great person, and that she will probably have more opportunities to become a mother later in life. Barbara can empathize with Tessa and tells her about her own story of struggling as a teenage mum. Although Barbara does not feel resentment or anger and loves her own children in spite of the hardships, she wishes for young women in a similar situation to have the choice without being blamed or stigmatized. She assures Tessa that an abortion is not always tantamount to prioritizing "oneself" over a child. To the contrary, Barbara stresses that responsible, chosen motherhood could prove to be more caring and thoughtful to others than having a child when one does not feel ready for it, and feels pressured into it by circumstances and public opinion. In the end, Tessa goes against her own fear and guilt feelings and acts according to Barbara's evaluative judgment that chosen motherhood at a more suitable time in her life is the value that Tessa should strive for. Seeing Barbara's personality, her social and moral identity, her caring and respectful manner, and her idea about chosen motherhood that does not seem to be fuelled by personal resentment or ideological convictions, Tessa judges that it would be admirable to be able to think with Barbara's mind. She begins to understand that with such a mind, from such a position, you could overcome the dichotomy between being a desperate teenage mum and an egoistical "career woman" uncapable of ever having children. She starts to understand and believe that chosen motherhood is an available concept for her and the path that she wants to strive toward, although the choice is hard and there is no guarantee that she will indeed find a happy family life later. She still feels that she cannot fully endorse the reasons for her choice right now. She still feels guilty, evil, cold-hearted and doomed for ever-lasting unhappiness. But she trusts that Barbara's evaluation is correct and that she can one day fully endorse that her choice was best in her circumstances. She trusts that when her own mind is sufficiently grown to overcome the internalized negative stereotypes and the guilt and fear induced by oppressive mechanisms, she will be able to see and endorse that the value of chosen motherhood justified the choice—even in the tragic case that she does not succeed in realizing it for reasons beyond her control. I suggest describing what happens in ABORTION as an instance of making use of another person's mind in an act of reasoning for circumventing oppressive mechanisms working within one's own mind, and thus succeeding in a hard choice under oppression. In a quite literal way, a central part of the evaluative reasoning is outsourced. The value that gives Tessa a justificatory reason in going through with her abortion is the value of chosen motherhood in happier and more stable circumstances that she has the potential to realize by that choice. However, Tessa's mind is fear and guilt-ridden because of oppressive mechanisms that work in addition to the usual emotional pressures in such a situation. Her mind is locked between her wish to have a family in better days and her internalized self-denigrating beliefs about women who choose an abortion. Because of her surroundings and upbringing, she can only insufficiently grasp the full value of chosen motherhood and is incapable of endorsing it as justifying the abortion. Being desperately torn between two options, Tessa does not know what is best. Then, Tessa meets Barbara, whose evaluation of the circumstances she trusts. She accepts her testimony and takes her advice. In her objections to moral testimony under oppression, Dular argues that "unjust social facts work to inappropriately inflate the self-trust of those with high social status and deflate the self-trust of those with low social status."6 Dular builds on work by Jones (2012) for the notion of self-trust and on work by Daukas (2006) to connect self-trust to epistemic confidence or epistemic uncertainty. Oppressive social structures "will therefore encourage members of dominant groups to develop undue epistemic confidence regarding their own abilities in relation to those of members of other groups, and members of oppressed groups to develop undue diffidence."7 Consequently, Dular concludes that, however innocent relying on moral testimony may be in ideal circumstances, it is not a good idea in unjust societies, in which people usually fare better when they rely on themselves. In the community in which Tessa lives, the male authorities, such as the priest and the doctor, are obviously the dominant group who enjoy public trust and high credibility. Dular's worry is thus that a vulnerable young woman in this community will turn to the priest or the doctor, conclude that abortion is wrong and blame herself for even considering it. Because of oppressive hierarchies, Tessa might be less inclined to believe in Barbara and her own evaluation of Barbara as trustworthy on that matter. Dular concludes that credibility or reliability judgments "track and are a function of social status"8 and does, in general, not recommend moral deference, as opposed to strengthening moral self-reliance. I think the argument is powerful. The danger is real, especially if Tessa's community is full of fundamentalist "pro-lifers" and almost completely closed to the more pluralist public. Still, I think this should not be generalized to all types of oppression. Even more, I think the argument underestimates the capacity of oppressed people to understand their own oppression at least in part and judge with at least some confidence who are "allies" and who are "enemies" within the social structure. It is plausible that oppressed people can identify people who are relevantly similar to them and have grown in an admirable way in interaction with the oppressive mechanisms. "Thinking with the mind of another" is not exactly like deference understood as merely doing or believing what an expert says, while taking oneself to be ignorant or bad at judging the matter at hand. Still, we can identify the phenomenon as a type of accepting testimony—or, more precisely, as a type of advice-taking, which we could define as accepting action-guiding testimony.9 Different from people who are merely ignorant or unwilling to think and thus defer to acclaimed experts, oppressed people who outsource a critical evaluation do assess credibility on their own. They have a theoretical understanding of how the advisor reasons, and why the conclusion of their reasoning is relevant for themselves, given the personality, history, and relationship between the advisor and the advisee. Dular, I think, does not pay sufficient attention to the possibility that deflated self-trust is not global but locally restricted to one's own moral judgments, while not affecting the evaluation of persons and personal encounters. Tessa, for example, might lack trust in her idea to have an abortion. She might not be able to resist the priest's judgment that women who abort prioritize themselves over children and are evil. However, she can develop relationships and come to understand that a caring, tough, and experienced community woman such as Barbara, having herself raised children under dire circumstances, while neither becoming bitter nor apologetic of enforced birth, is a more reliable source of normative knowledge than, say, the childless, male priest repeating the teachings of the church. After having given a hopefully relatable picture of the phenomenon of "thinking with the mind of another," I will explore in more depth how the outsourcing in the justification process exactly works and why the phenomenon can be as powerful as I believe it can be. I find two promising concepts put forth in recent debates worthwhile exploring in this context: Agnes Callard's notion of proleptic reasons and Eric Wiland's notion of epistemic solidarity and sharing responsibility. In this section, I spell out how an evaluative judgment instantiated in the mind of another can serve a justificatory function for our reasoning—a justificatory function that is outsourced. In this process, we are still the authors of our reasoning, but an evaluative element crucial for the internal justification to succeed—a "justificatory reason" for short—is not instantiated in the author, but in another mind. In the following, I will suggest that Agnes Callard's notion of a proleptic reason that motivates and justifies what she calls aspirational or transformative agency clarifies the normativity of the phenomenon. Proleptic reasons, according to Callard, are "the reasons that rationalize large-scale transformative pursuits. A proleptic reason is an acknowledgedly immature variant of a standard reason. […The agent] is moved by that consideration (be it competitive, testimonial, approximating, etc.) as a stand-in for another one."10 Callard coins this new category of reasons to explain how we can agentially create ourselves during the course of our lives, while we successively become different selves. While mundane agency is motivated by values that we already hold, transformative or aspirational agency is motivated by values that we are striving toward. We do not realize the values we already hold, but we acquire new values during the process. Callard contrasts the notion of a proleptic reason with the notion of an internal reason, which, in turn, is typically contrasted with the notion of an external reason. An internal reason, as the term has been introduced by Williams (1979), is a reason derived from a subjective motivational element we find within ourselves. As Callard points out, we can sometimes also have reason to embark on a radical transformation of ourselves—to aspire to become somebody else, which means to change precisely the subjective motivational components or personal values from which we normally derive our reasons. Paul (2014) has developed the notion of a transformative choice—a choice inducing a change in personality so profound that it changes one's deeply held values. The notion of "aspiration" captures a similar phenomenon: making a risky and deeply significant choice for strong reasons, without being able to fully understand what the choice may entail and how exactly it may transform one's values and perspective. According to Callard, a future self that attracts us, but that we cannot fully understand and embrace yet, can give us reasons of a peculiar kind. These reasons can exert a normative force on us and justify decisions—even though this is a different kind of justification than the justification by values we already firmly hold, which the literature calls "internal reasons." While some values happen to be incompatible with each other by mere coincidence, others are intrinsically in conflict with each other. "Intrinsic conflicts," Callard writes, "have a perspective-dividing quality: seeing one option as valuable gets in the way of seeing the other as valuable."11 For Tessa, who is torn because of a dilemma created by oppressive distortions of value judgments, the conflictual pregnancy seems to pose an intrinsic conflict: the conflict between the value of family and care that Tessa holds high, and the value of education and independence that she wants to realize after getting an abortion. Callard argues that we can only solve intrinsic conflicts by aspiring—by aiming to develop a new personality with new values that settle the conflict, without fully understanding or holding these values in our current state. In ABORTION, it seems that conflicted Tessa aspires to become a woman capable of embracing the concept of chosen motherhood and decisively refusing the oppressive deadlock between enforced birth and being egoistical and cold-hearted. Callard emphasizes that "aspiration is not a theory of solitary self-creation."12 She concedes that "aspirants do the work of becoming new people, but they cannot typically do this work alone."13 Tessa needs a woman like Barbara to invoke the sense in her that chosen motherhood is a possibility and to trust that she herself can realize it. In other words, Barbara lends her the value concept of chosen motherhood as a future option for her and the belief in its normative, justificatory power. Tessa accepts it and integrates it into her own reasoning, although her own evaluative psychology rebels against it with fear, guilt feelings, and a sense that she is acting cold-heartedly or even evil. However, she trusts Barbara as a testimonial provider of a good reason, accepts the reason in spite of her own difficulty in endorsing it as normative, and derives the strength and inspiration to aspire. While the motivational force is an inseparable part of the element that Tessa is missing and receives from Barbara, motivation and reassurance are not the only things that she receives. It is the very evaluative concept that is only partially available to her and that she needs to take Barbara's word for. I argue that the outsourced evaluative element in "thinking with the mind of another" can be understood as a testimonial proleptic reason. Following Callard's description, the reason that Tessa accepts on testimony has a "proximate face that speaks to the person she is now and a distal face fully visible only to the person she will become."14 When responding to Barbara, Tessa responds to the proximate face and thereby strengthens her courage. But she also needs to trust in the existence and value of the distal face that she will only discover when she reaches the standpoint of her aspiration—the standpoint of a sober and independently thinking woman who is at the same time caring and responsible. She needs the assumption that she will see a good reason for her current choice when she reaches that standpoint, not only to find the courage for her choice, but to justify it. To justify it, she needs to take the word of somebody who already sees the world from the desired standpoint. Only from that standpoint, it is possible to fully endorse the reason, which means to develop all the psychological criteria of regarding something as a reason—knowing what one is doing, not being ambivalent or guilt-ridden, and stably judging that it was a sound justifying reason, even when things go wrong. When you have not fully grasped a reason and just follow the motivational appeal of its proximate face, you run the risk that you will not endorse it once you learn about its distal face. Your decision would be insufficiently justified, if you had no grounds for the assumption that there is a distal face that you will be able to endorse. As long as your grasp is insufficient, you risk losing both motivation and justification in the face of criticism and adversity. Once you have a full grasp, your rational evaluation remains stable even when the world disappoints you and you lose motivation. Role models, inspirational sources, and supporters, it seems, play a crucial role in most, if not all, successful cases of aspiration. Of course, the technique of "thinking with the mind of another" to overcome intrinsic conflicts and successfully transform or grow into a new self is available, and potentially beneficial for everyone. Callard suggests that some of our biggest and most existential choices only become possible through our responsiveness to proleptic reasons. However, I think that the most immediate case of making use of the mind of a particular other to whom one stands in a personal relationship of trust is most interesting to people struggling with the effects of psychological oppression. While the aspirations of socially dominant people may sometimes be dependent on others only on a very abstract level, formed by the exemplars of tradition and culture, oppressed people, who do not feel represented in those traditions, can have an even stronger need for a concrete other as a source of proleptic reasons. For those people, counter-community building and connecting to people who share and understand the oppressive mechanisms is of special importance. Therefore, I propose that thinking with the mind of another can be an important enabler for transformation and personal growth in the face of oppression, though it is not without inherent risks to depend on others and partly go against one's own inner resistance for carrying through with a far-reaching decision. In the next section, I argue why allowing oneself to depend on others—risky as it may be—can be helpful for people strained by circumstances of oppression. Besides benefitting from others as sources of proleptic reasons, we can also benefit from others as direct partners in our practical reasoning and action. The formulation of "using" the mind of someone else, which I used earlier, may have the disadvantage of blurring the significant difference between an epistemic tool and a reassuring and empathetic partner. In the meantime, it is not at least this aspect of advice-giving and -taking that contributes significantly to its transformative power in vulnerable positions. As Katharina Sodoma (2022) points out, the psychological effects of oppression can be counteracted by what she calls "affective empathy." A gaslit person, Sodoma argues, can be reassured "in their ability to make evaluative judgments based on their emotional reactions"15 by an empathetic other, but not by a perception speaking in favor of their judgment. Human psychology, it seems, can be made to doubt all perceptions by social oppression, but can gain confidence back by others' assurance. When we think with the mind of another, we do not only rely on the other as a source of some evaluative information that we haven't perceived or thought of before. By relying on Barbara, rather than on her own conflicted psychology, Tessa gains a genuine partner in her hard and risky choice, or so I will argue in this section. It is worth paying more attention to the fact that Barbara is a real, concrete other who relates to Tessa, sees her, understands her story, and decides to give advice on a grave matter directly to her. In this way, another person becomes an integrated part of Tessa's reasoning process. She does not just provide information to facilitate Tessa's own reflection and make her see something she did not see before. Rather, Barbara sees Tessa's future—the future of a stable and happy woman who is able to choose motherhood in a self-determined way—on her behalf, and this is enough for Tessa to trust and dare. This brings me to an intriguing idea of epistemic solidarity defended by Wiland (2021). Wiland starts with a picture he found in the work of Karl Marx, describing the communist society as a form of social organization in which we could "appropriate" the senses of other people by making their enjoyments and experiences our own.16 This idea is based on a social view of human nature, according to which we can value and benefit from experiences independently of whether they are our own or those of others. Wiland argues that epistemic solidarity is compatible with individual autonomy but has an independent value. Epistemic solidarity would be a valuable gain even if it came at the cost of individual autonomy. An important gain comes from the possibility of benefiting from perspectives that we could never take ourselves due to the limitations of our particular social position. By relying on the judgments of others, we can make them relevant for our evaluation of the world and our actions, even if we do not have full individual access to all the evaluative truths. Moral understanding can be, as Dishaw (2024) argues, essentially "between" people, rather than being instantiated in an individual mind. Wiland emphasizes the potential of moral testimony to help us overcome epistemic injustices. By explicitly taking testimony from a person usually suffering testimonial injustice or being marginalized in epistemic practices, we help to undo those injustices and lift the downgraded or marginalized judgments up. Wiland suggests that we should even do so when we ourselves cannot fully understand the judgment. This could be the case when it comes to judgments of whether an act is sexist or racist.17 Notably, Wiland is mostly interested in the gains of testimony for the worldview of the privileged or socially dominant and pays less attention to the benefits of testimony for the marginalized and oppressed. As I mentioned earlier, there are strong reasons why philosophers can be skeptical about the oppressed accepting testimony. In this section, I will continue my defense of moral testimony as a way of doing what is best and growing in the face of oppression. What is interesting in Wiland's account is that he develops a distinctive conception of advice as giving rise to a joint agent, consisting of advisor and advisee performing an action together. I think that understanding this possibility is an important part of the explanation for why thinking with the mind of another can be a powerful enabler of transformative choice under oppression. Wiland's idea of "advising duos"—units of advisor and advisee—performing as joint agents rests on theories of joint agency as distinct modes of agency.18 Joint actions cannot be reduced to their interlocking individual contributions; instead, they should be understood as singular actions in their own right, being characterized by goals that are essentially common rather than individual.19 Accordingly, the responsibility for these types of actions is essentially shared. This fact is also represented in how the criminal law deals with crimes committed on demand: responsibility and guilt are usually assigned both to the immediate perpetrator and the person who demanded the crime. Usually, instructing others to act criminally, as opposed to committing crimes oneself, does not make one less of a criminal perpetrator. This suggests that, in crimes committed on another person's demand, demanding is not external to the act. Instead, acting and demanding are both internal parts of the criminal act as such. Building on this idea, I propose that people struggling emotionally—especially when the emotional turmoil is exacerbated by oppression—can benefit from being part of a joint agent when making their choices. I propose to understand Tessa in ABORTION as part of a joint agent who performs actions with shared responsibility. The fact that the responsibility is shared makes it possible for a struggling individual to act and take responsibility in a kind of "leap of faith" that she could not have done entirely on her own. Before I explain why this may have special importance for the oppressed, let us first examine the notion of shared responsibility in more detail. If Tessa performs the abortion, the action is in an essential sense the product of both Tessa's and Barbara's reasoning, joining one another in one reasoning process. The advisor, who takes her role seriously, makes herself vulnerable to guilt and blame from the advisee in case of failure. If Tessa's life turns out well, by contrast, Barbara gains the joy of sharing her own experiences to improve things for others, and eventually also the opportunity to contribute to a more just society for women in general. The advisee, by contrast, risks disappointment and failure, but gains the strength and opportunity of a leap of faith that radically transforms her life. Both advisor and advisee have—in different ways, but to a largely the same degree—the same goal in mind—to solve the existential predicament of a person and help them real