Callum Zavos MacRae (Jagiellonian University), "Does domination require unequal power?"

Forthcoming, Philosophical Quarterly

By Callum Zavos MacRae

If you ask a contemporary political philosopher to define domination, they will probably respond that A dominates B just when A has the arbitrary or unconstrained power to interfere with B. There are further hard questions about just what it is that makes power arbitrary, about what sorts of entities can occupy the roles of A and B, and about whether we should restrict the relevant notion of interference to interference with a subset of particularly important or basic interests. But as a first step at least, many theorists will tell you that domination as arbitrary or unconstrained power is the place to start.

However, many contemporary political philosophers also think that domination is fundamentally a kind of unjust power inequality. In the words of Christopher McCammon, writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for ‘Domination’, theories of domination ‘seek to clarify and systematize our judgments about what it is to be weak against uncontrolled strength… [and, as such] theorists of domination tend to agree about this much: domination is a kind of unconstrained, unjust imbalance of power’.

Indeed, according to McCammon, that domination involves unequal power is part of the ‘basic idea’ of domination—that is, the target phenomenon that different theoretical treatments are all aiming at and disagreeing over. Accordingly, some (but not all) of the major definitions of domination available in the contemporary literature explicitly include an unequal power requirement as a necessary condition for domination.

It is tempting to think that it doesn’t much matter which of these understandings we start with, since both will end up at the same place at the end of the day. On the one hand, if we start with the idea that domination is arbitrary or unconstrained power to interfere, it might seem that a requirement of unequal power will follow as a consequence of that definition. If we imagine that B has just as much power to interfere with A as vice versa then it can seem hard to see how A’s power over B could count as arbitrary. After all, B can use their reciprocal power over A to keep A’s power in check, by offering credible threats of retaliation, for example.

On the other hand, if we start with the idea that domination is an unjust power imbalance, there are a variety of familiar arguments from the republican tradition for thinking that arbitrariness (suitably understood) is what distinguishes just from unjust power inequalities. So, no matter which basic idea we start with, we will end up with the same view—that domination occurs in power inequalities that involve arbitrary or unconstrained power.

But consider Andreas Schmidt’s Wild West case:

You live in a Wild West setting where everyone, including yourself, is an incredibly good shot. Whoever shoots first will kill another person with near absolute certainty. Whenever someone shoots someone, their death is neither revenged nor—because there is no law or law enforcement—prosecuted (2018: 185)

In Wild West we have an awful lot of arbitrary, unconstrained power. Everyone has the power to take away everyone else’s life with total impunity. But we also have perfectly equal power. Nobody has more power than anybody else.

Wild West thus drives a wedge between the two understandings of domination sketched above. If we think that domination is arbitrary power, we will think that there is an awful lot of domination in Wild West. If we think it is a kind of unjust power imbalance, we won’t.

So, which understanding should we choose?

In his terrific 2018 paper “Domination without Inequality? Mutual Domination, Republicanism, and Gun Control” Andreas Schmidt mounts a series of arguments for thinking that there is domination in Wild West. Moreover, as Schmidt notes, this has a series of very important implications for how we understand domination, as well as for how we understand those political theories that make extensive use of the concept, such as republicanism and relational egalitarianism.

However, I argue in my paper, pace Schmidt, that there are good grounds to deny that domination is taking place in Wild West, and to affirm the claim that there can be no domination without unequal power. My argument is effectively a reductio: if we join Schmidt in extending the concept of domination to Wild West on the grounds that it involves arbitrary power (and so reject the unequal power condition), we will be forced to say a bunch of other things about domination that most domination theorists will not want to say.

The argument I give doesn’t aim to show that the arbitrary power approach is incoherent or totally untenable, so it doesn’t rule out someone making the case that we should radically revise our understanding of domination theory to fit a view on which domination is possible with equal power. But it does seek to show that a quite radical revision would be in order—more radical than I think contributors to the recent literature have so far realised. If domination doesn’t require unequal power then, if I’m right, it turns out to be a quite different concept to the one that many in contemporary political philosophy have taken it to be.

Moreover, the argument doesn’t set out to show that the notion of arbitrary power has no role to play in a good theory of domination. Perhaps arbitrariness is the best account of what makes power inequalities unjust, and so an arbitrary power condition belongs in our best theory of domination alongside an independent requirement of unequal power. But such an independent requirement will be necessary if we want to retain various important features of our thinking about domination. Or so I argue.

What are these radical revisions to the concept of domination that I claim are forced on us if we abandon the unequal power requirement? The full case, along with some responses to objections, is presented in the paper. But the short answer consists in the following three things.

(1) If domination can take place in equal power contexts, then it doesn’t make sense to attribute various features to it that many theorists have taken to be central parts of the concept. For example, most straightforwardly, it doesn’t make sense to say that domination involves a denial of a kind of equal status, or an inability to stand tall and look others in the eye. But it also doesn’t seem apt to describe it as a form of subordination, subjugation or servitude, nor to say that domination is a kind of personal rule or mastery. Similarly, we are forced to jettison the claim that domination prevents one from occupying a certain sort of discursive status, along with the claim that it involves particular kinds of objectionable ingratiation pressures.

(2) If domination can take place in equal power contexts, then it also looks like domination doesn’t do a very good job of identifying the distinct social wrong that seems to occur in the paradigm cases of domination—such as the kindly master, the decent husband in a patriarchal society, or the benevolent despot. Domination theory has long traded on the idea that it is particularly well-suited to capturing our intuitions about what’s objectionable in cases like these. But it is hard to avoid the thought that inferior status, subjugation, subordination, mastery, discursive hierarchy, ingratiation and so on are central parts of whatever it is that unites these kinds of cases.

(3) Finally, I think that accepting that domination can take place in equal power contexts makes it significantly harder to claim—as most domination theorists do—that domination is always prima facie objectionable. (I try to motivate this with an imagined example of arbitrary power without a power inequality in which it seems strange to raise the sort of moral complaint associated with a charge of domination.)

If the argument succeeds, then domination theorists should think long and hard before they accept definitions of domination that allow for domination in equal power contexts. Accepting a definition like that amounts to rejecting a series of claims that many contributors have taken to be more or less fixed points in our theorising about the concept, and so forces a drastic revision in our understanding of just what it is we’re theorising about when we do domination theory.