Social Dependence

We often reason about what our lives would have been like if we had belonged to different social groups—for example, ‘If I had been Black, being pulled over by police would have been more frightening’, or ‘If I had not been a woman, I would have had an easier time in that meeting’. This paper makes sense of such countersocial counterfactuals, conditionals whose antecedents run contrary to social facts, and in many cases, contrary to identity facts and essentiality facts. It is suggested that many countersocials are counterpossibles. Based on the non-trivial truth of some countersocials, it is argued that social categories are literally causal: they are causes and effects, both of other general phenomena and some particular events in our lives. These threads are then brought together in order to examine intersectional oppression. Intersectional oppression can be illuminated by appeal to proportionate causation, or causation containing the appropriate level of causal detail.