1. Burdened virtues and a meta-vice: Tessman on the problem of indifference

Tessman adopts a virtue ethics approach to her feminist study of oppression because of her conviction that feminists have not dwelled long enough in the damages to character sustained under oppressive circumstances, and the ways that these moral damages can obstruct liberatory projects and dim the prospects for a “good life.” But she has to critique and expand upon the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition in light of her liberatory aims; Aristotle does not offer a structural analysis of oppression, for example, though he acknowledges that “external” goods—as in, “access to sufficient material goods”—are required for flourishing (Tessman Reference Tessman2005, 57). Aristotle also opens the door to consideration of systemic oppression with his suggestion that “luck” is a factor in achieving eudaimonia. In contexts in which the social collective boasts longstanding, systemic oppression, following feminist philosopher Claudia Card, “moral luck” can be understood to connote something more than the random set of good or bad occurrences that any person will inevitably face in their lifetime. Rather, in oppressive contexts, moral luck can be interpreted as the social position into which one is randomly born. Good luck means being born into a social position that entails greater access to social, financial, and material resources, and bad luck means being born into precarity—predisposed to violence, marginalization, injury, and death, and inadequate support for one’s material and existential well-being, in general.

Card, furthermore, conceives of “moral luck” as constitutive of the self: not only in the sense that there are many aspects of self-constitution that are beyond anyone’s control, but also insofar as oppressed people are consistently more likely to confront social conditions that substantially affect their self-development. Expanding upon Card’s insight, Tessman sets out to explore what she considers to be an undertheorized form of harm associated with oppression: the “moral damage” that she says “occurs when there is a certain sort of self that one ought to be, but the unconducive conditions of oppression bar one from cultivating this self”; that is, the self under oppression is “prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues” (4). This, in itself, is an important insight into the search for a liberatory ethics under oppression: the notion that oppression can obstruct access to some or all of the traditional virtues. On the Aristotelian account, not being able to develop the virtues would disqualify a person from flourishing, and prevent them from being able to resist oppression. To acknowledge the reality of oppression requires the liberatory-minded philosopher to adjust their perspective on the relationship between the virtues and flourishing when the self sustains damage, on account of structural factors, that mirrors the already “damaged” state of the social collective.

Tessman says that she is most interested in the moral damage endured by “the victims of and the resisters to oppression” (11). But she is understandably cautious about labelling certain oppressed groups as “damaged” in light of long histories of victim blaming—for example, longstanding efforts to account for Black poverty by pathologizing Black Americans. To avoid the risk that producing an account of damaged subjectivity might be used to justify discriminatory policies, Tessman carefully distinguishes her “critical” approach to moral damage from other, problematic approaches: both the “conservative victim-blaming stance,” which assumes that damaged subjects can will themselves to change and not even need structural reform to address persistent social injustices; and the “liberal pity-evoking approach,” which appeals to liberal sympathies in an attempt to achieve reform. In contrast to these, Tessman’s critical approach is “primarily concerned with understanding moral damage in order to develop collective practices within communities of resistance that will effectively address or repair the damage” (46). Thus, by exposing the extent to which the oppressed are morally damaged, Tessman aims to equip communities of resistance with tools that can aid in their remediating efforts. However, she also makes a powerful case for the value of simply dwelling in the harm of moral damage; by unveiling an “extremely grim” reality, she will compel her readers to “pause to lament the fact that the best—in the circumstances—is really not very good at all” (5).

It is Tessman’s desire to explore whether moral damage is incurred by oppressors as well as the oppressed,Footnote ⁴ however, that leads her into an analysis of the fundamental mechanisms of privilege and oppression—specifically, by looking to the realm of sensitivity and attention to others’ well-being, or suffering. Having distinguished between self-regarding and other-regarding virtues, and having noticed that Aristotle comments quite extensively on the special moral praiseworthiness, and difficulty of exercising, the latter, Tessman determines that a basic lack or failure of other-regarding virtuousness—indifference toward others—sustains and upholds existing systems of oppression. Indifference, Tessman asserts, is enabled by the freedom of the privileged to not notice the suffering upon which their own advantages depend; and it is a vice because it gives the privileged an illusory sense of their own goodness “by masking the effects of [their] unjust, cruel, callous, [and] dishonest … actions” (78). According to Tessman, it is common for the privileged to misjudge their own virtuousness, as they tend to live in willful ignorance of the structural oppression from which they benefit (materially and existentially, if not morally). With the goal of theorizing an inclusive sociality that would enable flourishing for all, Tessman cautiously proposes that sensitivity and attention to others’ well-being, or lack thereof, is a meta-virtue, whereas indifference—specifically, “indifference to the (preventable and unjust) suffering of certain others”—is a meta-vice that “facilitates other vices” (78).

Let us pause to take stock of the way that Tessman already departs from Aristotle in her naming of the indifference of the privileged toward the oppressed as a vice. To be sure, Aristotle helpfully conceives of human flourishing as achievable only in sociality, because he believes that humans are “by nature … political animal[s].”Footnote ⁵ And if, as Tessman puts it, “humans are social beings who depend upon the well-being of a social collectivity for their own well-being” (73), then, even for Aristotle, the flourishing of individuals depends upon a “successful sociality.” But Tessman critically diverges from Aristotle in her definition of a successful sociality. Aristotle endorses the exclusion of women, slaves, and foreigners from the social collective, not taking this exclusion as a mark against the success of sociality; but Tessman is adamant about being inclusive of everyone. When Aristotle talks about the flourishing of “all” upon which individual flourishing depends, then, he really only means “some particular others” (74), taking for granted that other others are excluded; but for Tessman, “all” really means all—a successful sociality must be fully inclusive. Tessman insists that “the pursuit of one’s own flourishing cannot count as morally praiseworthy (and what one attains cannot count as flourishing) unless one is engaged, as part of that pursuit, in promoting the flourishing of an inclusive social collectivity” (76). On this view, the privileged are not really flourishing, even if they think that they are, when they fail attend to the suffering of others whom they may consider unworthy of full inclusion in the social collective.

But Tessman runs into trouble in her effort to uphold sensitivity and attention to others’ well-being or suffering as a traditional virtue. Following the Aristotelian model, she expects this virtue to admit of a morally praiseworthy mean, since both extremes in this realm of human behavior and feeling are “morally unacceptable,” each in their own way (82). Extreme indifference, on the one hand, she declares to be “morally horrifying” (83); “one grasps for strong enough language of moral condemnation” to describe those who are indifferent “[i]n the face of terrible suffering,” she proclaims, going so far as to invoke Aristotle’s association of this vice with brutishness, and relegation of it to a zone beyond normal viciousness (84). Excessive sensitivity, on the other hand, is “psychically unsustainable,” because it would be overwhelming to open oneself to the pain of the whole world, and simultaneously anguishing to be aware of still not being able to help everyone (83). Isn’t there some mean state between these two extremes that won’t leave the moral agent with a “moral remainder”Footnote ⁶ of regret? Tessman’s answer is, sadly, no; there is no intermediary position that doesn’t occupy an “uncomfortable moral status” (83) because any such position “require[s] that one be either too indifferent or too anguished or both” (87). Given the excessive suffering in the world, Tessman realizes, any amount of sensitivity to others’ suffering will necessarily also involve a “cold turning away” from other others who are suffering greatly; and that “cold turning away” is horrifying and wrong. Indeed, given the world’s present condition, any expression of the virtue of sensitivity to others’ suffering will paradoxically entail a simultaneous expression of the vice of indifference. And Tessman is anguished by this. Describing her search for the mean as “fruitless,” she bemoans the fact that “[t]he background conditions of the world we live in make it impossible to escape both the horror of indifference and the psychic pain (and perhaps exhaustion) of sensitivity and attention” (85).

It might appear as though Tessman runs into this problem that Aristotle does not because the “background conditions” of her world are objectively different from his; perhaps there was simply less suffering in the world when Aristotle wrote the Nicomachean Ethics, so, had he tried, he would have been able to identify a virtuous mean in this realm, whereas Tessman cannot. But this is not why Tessman finds herself in the situation of needing to “break” with the Aristotelian framework. Rather, it’s that Aristotle did not account for “background conditions” at all—if, by background conditions, we mean the backdrop of vast suffering caused by oppression. In spite of the disdain for indifference that Aristotle appears to share with Tessman, then, he is oblivious to the indifference of the privileged to the suffering of the oppressed, because he condones social exclusion and the founding of the polis’s success on the backs of subordinated women and slaves. It is Tessman’s concern with exactly these oppressive features of the organization of social life that sensitizes her to background conditions with which Aristotle was not concerned—suffering that is “tied to injustice (including oppression, domination, and exploitation) and that is thus necessarily a result of human actions and potentially preventable”—and attunes her to the ethical ramifications of a form of indifference that he ignores (84).

Tessman’s failed search for the mean compels her to posit the existence of a special set of virtues that she calls burdened virtues: traits that “make a contribution to human flourishing—if they succeed in doing so at all—only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression … while in other ways they detract from their bearer’s well-being, in some cases so deeply that their bearer may be said to lead a wretched life” (95). Burdened virtues occupy the paradoxical position of positively contributing to flourishing in some ways, and simultaneously detracting from it in others. Tessman concludes that sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is a burdened virtue: it is morally commendable and necessary for achieving social justice, but also inhibits flourishing because it evokes so much anguish—and, in always being joined to indifference, is never fully virtuous. Indeed, Tessman cannot accept any amount of “cold turning away” from others as morally praiseworthy: “[t]urning one’s back on any single instance of great suffering is morally problematic,” she asserts (85). Anguish aside, then, the impossibility of disentangling sensitivity from indifference guarantees that a morally praiseworthy mean does not exist; every intermediary position is tainted by the viciousness of the indifference that it involves. Reserving a role for the burden of the anguish that indifference (supposedly) evokes does serve a purpose, however. It makes for a failure of self-regarding virtuousness (causing pain to oneself, which detracts from well-being) that now runs concurrent with the failure of other-regarding virtuousness (not being able to adequately help suffering others); and it preserves a model of more or less affectively intact subjectivity, even in a context that makes traditional virtues unattainable. Indifference—understood, minimally, as an enactment of insensitivity via inaction, if not actual insensitivity on the level of feeling—may be inescapable, but at least it can be accompanied by bad feeling as a marker of the subject’s intact capacity for virtuousness. Even under these dire circumstances, anguish can track the convergence of the moral agent’s psychic state with normative standards of morality, proving that they are not totally brutish.

What is so horrible about indifference? Tessman’s anecdote about her own personal journey with indifference, and reference to the Holocaust as an historical site of atrocity enabled by indifference, helps to motivate her position on this. She reports that, as an atheist Jew, facing the fact of the Holocaust’s occurrence centrally entailed asking why so many people simply stood by as millions were sent to their death, carrying on with their everyday lives against a backdrop of mass extermination. Especially after reading Norman Geras’s (Reference Geras1998) book, The contract of mutual indifference, she finds it very painful to recognize the “bystander phenomenon” for its role in enabling this atrocity; and equally painful to recognize how this phenomenon persists today—as millions, herself included, continue to be bystanders to countless new atrocities locally and globally. In her own struggle to avoid the abyss of “the horrifying realm of indifference,” Tessman recounts starting to send monthly payments to Amnesty International, and ultimately getting her credit card on file with them (83). But she is painfully aware that this is just a small gesture that barely relieves her from her complicity with indifference. As a case in point, she recalls receiving a letter from Médicins Sans Frontières telling of the atrocious violence faced by a young woman in Sierra Leone. “[E]ven if I responded as fully as I could, it would never be enough,” she laments (83).

By emphasizing her own sensitivity to the suffering of strangers, and the pain she feels over being forced into indifference, Tessman strongly distinguishes her position from Aristotle’s. Aristotle was implicitly indifferent to the suffering of the oppressed, but Tessman, in stark contrast, showcases how forcefully she feels the “unattainable demand” to try to respond to suffering and address pervasive social inequality (86). If privilege is sustained by the illusion of flourishing whilst multitudes suffer, Tessman shatters that illusion by way of her harsh reprobation of indifference, and accommodation of her entire ethical theory to the ruin it causes. She laments a world in which it seems that one is given no choice but to be a bad person by being complicit in the vast suffering of others, and writes eloquently of the “tragic dilemma” that, unlike Rosalind Hursthouse,Footnote ⁷ she takes to be completely common in the contemporary context:

Tessman clearly endeavors to theorize through a non-ideal lens insofar as she acknowledges the dire nature of the social conditions in which contemporary subjects are forced to strive to cultivate virtuousness and to fight injustice. For her, tragedy is a routine feature of everyday life; appallingly, the person seeking something resembling a good life cannot do better than act terribly, all of the time. Given her depiction of the harshness of this scenario, though, and the acute pain that this tragic dilemma brings on daily, one is left wondering whether being able to carry on at all doesn’t require some kind of internalization of indifference beyond what Tessman is willing to admit. If terrible circumstances force us to act terribly all of the time, and in spite of our best efforts to do well, wouldn’t a cultivated numbness ease the pain and make it easier to endure this unchosen immersion in ongoing tragedy?

Tessman also does not expand the scope of her analysis of the ethics of indifference to include the perspective of the most marginalized—those who suffer the most under oppression. She never moves beyond the standpoint of the relatively privileged person who is in a position to meaningfully ask themselves whose suffering to respond to, and whose to ignore—with the suffering of millions on the line—because they have enough resources to spare. This raises the question of whether the oppressed are part of the “we” she describes as facing this particular tragic dilemma of wanting to express sensitivity toward the suffering of others, but being caught in a bind of forced indifference. Of course, sending money to Amnesty is not the only way to tend to others’ suffering; historically, underprivileged individuals have eased the suffering of others by participating in resistance struggles, against the odds of their own exhaustion and lack of material resources. Still, Tessman seems to have falsely universalized the particular situation faced by the virtue-seeking privileged subject, which casts doubt on whether her determinations about the irredeemable viciousness of indifference apply beyond the specific social position from which she has considered this problem. Notice how readily she casts aspersion upon being “completely indifferent” even as she works to acknowledge the way that tragic circumstances can leave a person with only terrible choices. She does not examine what it might mean to uphold sensitivity to others’ suffering as a virtue, even a burdened one, for those who may already be so anguished by their own suffering, and the suffering of those around them, that to do so imposes yet another undue burden. Should the oppressed person who is forced into indifference by their social circumstances be judged so harshly, according to the same metric as the privileged?

2. The dialectic of Adornian coldness: from scourge to self-preservation

Adorno may not seem like an obvious theorist to turn to for resources to aid in developing a more robust feminist approach to the ethics of indifference—though I am certainly not the first to employ Adornian theory toward feminist ends,Footnote ⁹ nor am I the first to draw upon his provocative theorizing of a form of indifference that he calls “bourgeois coldness.”Footnote ¹⁰ Prominent strands of Adorno’s attention to coldness resonate with Tessman’s critique of indifference. For Adorno, the coldness implied in “the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity” (Adorno Reference Adorno2001, 2) which entails “profoun[d] indifferen[ce] toward whatever happens to everyone else except for a few to whom [one is] closely, and, possibly, by tangible interests bound” (Adorno Reference Adorno, Henry and Tiedemann2003, 30) enables atrocity, as without coldness, “AuschwitzFootnote ¹¹ would not have been possible” (Adorno Reference Adorno2001, 2). And coldness is central to Adorno’s diagnosis of late capitalism as offering only a damaged form of life which cannot be lived rightlyFootnote ¹²—echoing Tessman’s depiction of oppression as ensuring moral failureFootnote ¹³ given the certainty of ongoing tragic dilemmas. Furthermore, because coldness implicates people in the evil of a genocidal social order, Adorno goes so far as to introduce a “new categorical imperative”: that people rearrange their thinking and conduct so as to avert further disaster—specifically, by cultivating the disposition of identification-based solidarity, which is similar to sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering. But even if Adorno’s critique of coldness aligns, in some ways, with Tessman’s work, and his minimalist morality can be interpreted through the lens of a negative Aristotelianism,Footnote ¹⁴ his dialectical approach to coldness nevertheless complicates Tessman’s portrayal of indifference as an irredeemable vice, and her valorization of sensitivity to others’ suffering as a (burdened) virtue.

For Adorno, coldness exists on a spectrum: from the “specific” and extreme version, which he associates with “the guilty of Auschwitz,” to the more “general” (Adorno Reference Adorno, Henry and Tiedemann2003, 28). On the extreme side is a character type that Adorno calls the “manipulative character,” whom he describes in The authoritarian personality as the “potentially most dangerous” of all of the high-scorers on the Fascist scale; Adolf Eichmann, one of the masterminds of the Final Solution, is a prime example.Footnote ¹⁵ Eichmann employs an extreme version of the “stereopathic mentality” (Adorno et al. Reference Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Nevitt Sanford1969, 746) intent upon classifying others under the heading of stereotypes—dividing the “whole world … into empty, schematic, administrative fields” so as to be more easily able to treat them as objects to be “handled, manipulated, [and] seized by [his] own theoretical and practical patterns” (767). If we were to reduce this type down to a formula, Adorno specifies, that formula would be “the type of reified consciousness”Footnote ¹⁶ (Adorno Reference Adorno, Henry and Tiedemann2003, 27)—meaning that they view people as things, and fail to comprehend the extent to which humans are conditioned, “posit[ing] as absolute what exists contingently” (28). This is predicated on their complete inability to love, he further stipulates, and a “deficient libidinal relationship to other persons” (29). Instead of loving people, this type “loves” technology—fetishizing it, worshipping its efficiency, and forgetting that it is a human creation and not a force of its own. “[W]hatever of the ability to love somehow survives in them they must expend on devices,” Adorno observes (Reference Adorno, Henry and Tiedemann2003, 29). This psychological profile of the manipulative character helps to explain how it is possible that “one who cleverly devises a train system that brings the victims to Auschwitz as quickly and smoothly as possible forgets about what happens to them there” (29).

But this “specific” version of coldness is distinguished from the “general” version of coldness by degree more so than by kind. For Adorno believes that coldness is a diagnosis that applies to everyone under late capitalism, which means that everyone shares certain traits in common with Eichmann: centrally, an inability to love and identify with others. “Very likely human beings are without exception under a bane, none capable of love,” Adorno writes in Negative dialectics (Adorno Reference Adorno2001, 354–58); their ability “to identify with another’s suffering is slight” (Adorno Reference Adorno1998, 274). It is because of their coldness that everyone in the general population—at least, everyone who wasn’t targeted for genocidal violence, but, minimally, stood by and let it happen—was complicit in the Holocaust, and is complicit in its potential recurrence. Indeed, Adorno declares in his 1967 radio address, “Education after Auschwitz,” that Auschwitz would not have been possible if coldness were not “a fundamental trait of anthropology, that is, the constitution of people as they in fact exist in our society” (Adorno Reference Adorno, Henry and Tiedemann2003, 30). This means that coldness—while not innate or essential to human nature—has become second nature in his historical moment. Coldness inheres in modern subjectivity on such a deep psycho-affective level that it does not need to be consciously chosen in any given set of particular circumstances; rather, people just are cold. And the reason that they have been “pervaded by a chill”Footnote ¹⁷ is that coldness is “produce[d] and reproduce[d]” by the “societal order” (31); in other words, coldness is a subjective expression of objective social and economic forces.

Primary among these objective forces is the spread of the capitalist logic of equivalence beyond its proper place in the economic sphere to other spheres of life. According to the logic of equivalence, goods on the capitalist marketplace must be reduced to those traits on the basis of which they are commensurable so that they can be exchanged; people become commodified, as well—as producers selling their labor, and as consumers purchasing the products of labor power. But all of bourgeois society becomes “ruled by” equivalence, Adorno and Horkheimer explain in Dialectic of enlightenment, as this logic comes to preside over the previously “private” sphere in which people once sought refuge from the economic sphere. “[T]he entire private domain is being engulfed by a mysterious activity that bears all the features of commercial life without there being actually any business to transact,” Adorno bleakly observes in Minima moralia. “[S]oon there is no relationship that is not seen as a ‘connection’” (Adorno Reference Adorno and Jephcott2006, 23). With the spread of the market mentality into “private” life, people come to view one another as replaceable objects—and as mere means serving other self-interested ends—rather than as distinctive individuals.

Concurrent with developments in Enlightenment philosophy, the modern thought form that Adorno labels “identity thinking” also comes to dominate over the way that subjects relate to objects. Identity thinking subsumes particulars under universals—much like what Kant describes as the application of concepts, or the categories of the understanding, to intuitions furnished by the senses. While Kant presents this process as inevitable for human cognition, however, Adorno understands it to be historically contingent and highlights its pernicious implications: the brutal leveling of all “non-identity” under the sign of sameness. By conceiving of objects merely as the set of those characteristics that are shared with other objects (on account of which they can all be classified), identity thinking “thereby obliterates the particularity of objects, their differences from one another, their individual development and histories, along with other unique traits,” Deborah Cook explains (Cook Reference Cook and Cook2012, 9–10). And, for Adorno, this obliteration is literal; identity thinking leads on a straight path to genocide as the ultimate expression of its implicit annihilation of difference.

Finally, if capitalism encourages people to become cold to each other, as they indifferently view one another as mere “connections,” one might expect morality to come to the rescue by demanding a more robust regard for others. But Adorno critiques modern moral philosophy, as well, for formalizing moral norms in a way that establishes mutual disinterestedness as the very condition for moral consideration. When we subject concrete particularities to the rational moral law—as we would under a Kantian moral system—we are essentially detaching from others at the very same moment that we are supposedly taking them into account. As Jay Bernstein explains, then, modern moral and political practices that rest on this “presupposition of lack of interest … will secretly transmit coldness as a morally legitimate stance toward others since they will presuppose that others are of no concern to me as what moral deliberation must override” (Bernstein Reference Bernstein2001, 400). The dangers of this indifference as the definitive disposition of modern moralizing are expressed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s excursus on Sade’s Juliette: their comparison of Juliette’s orchestration of elaborate orgies to Kant’s elaborate formalization of morality is meant to show that, under Enlightenment morality, evil outcomes (such as sadism and cruelty) are on par with moral ones.

Crucially, then, for Adorno, coldness is so deeply entrenched in modern subjectivity that it is barely possible for people to opt out of it. While it may seem as if coldness is merely externally imposed upon modern subjects by a capitalist social order, it is also “reproduced internally by each subject,” Simon Mussell explains, “in order to go on living amid a false world” (Mussell Reference Mussell2013, 60). That is, under capitalism, coldness is required for survival. Homer’s Odysseus, as the prototype of bourgeois subjectivity in Dialectic of enlightenment, symbolically initiates this new mode of relating to oneself and others when he becomes cold in order to survive his arduous journey toward univocal selfhood. Adorno and Horkheimer describe Odysseus as exhibiting an “unambiguous purpose of self-preservation” (Adorno and Horkheimer Reference Adorno, Horkheimer, Jephcott and Noerr2002, 38), doing whatever it takes to survive temptations that would derail him from achieving the status of an “identical, enduring” (42), “purpose-directed” (26) self. In this process, Odysseus hardens himself, making himself all but insensate as he learns to dominate inner and outer nature. He outwardly performs the repression of inner urges, for example, when he forces himself to listen to the Sirens’ song, bound to the mast as his crew rows past, ears plugged. Odysseus becomes cold in order to survive in a world that requires “the pursuit of one’s own interests against the interests of everyone else” (Adorno Reference Adorno, Henry and Tiedemann2003, 30).

This conception of coldness as settling into people’s innermost centers distinguishes Adorno’s perspective from Tessman’s: first, on the level of their description of indifference as a modern-day relational disposition. Notwithstanding her effort to attend to oppressive contexts, Tessman theorizes through an ideal lens when she implies that contemporary subjects will only reluctantly “coldly turn away” from others; this is a performance or enactment of indifference that recurs, as a routine feature of everyday life, and yet somehow is not internalized as one’s default mode of relating to others. While Tessman acknowledges that people today have no choice but to become complicit with indifference, then, and even associates this with a form of “moral damage” insofar as this experience is painful, she resists thinking about this kind of damage to character in terms of entrenched distortions to emotional and psychic life. The subject of Tessman’s ethical analysis, struggling to be virtuous in spite of their burdens, is one who wants to respond, and is anguished by not being able to respond more fully, to the suffering of others. But because Adorno presents coldness as such a basic, structuring feature of subjectivity, the subject of his ethical analysis is not one who is anguished by having to turn coldly away from vast and immeasurable suffering. Most people, Adorno might point out, would simply throw away letters they receive in the mail from charity organizations requesting donations, and not worry about it. For they have internalized indifference such that not responding is just their usual way.

Thus, for Adorno, coldness is a form of psycho-affective damage that is so essential to the project of survival under capitalism that it runs very deep; people should be expected to be cold, and not necessarily to be critically aware of this. This is why Adorno gets on the radio in 1967—in one of many addresses that he delivered in the last decade of his life, in an effort to re-educate the West German public after his return from exile—to call for a widespread reckoning with coldness. Considering that he believed praxis—as in “revolutionary/transformative activity” (Freyenhagen Reference Freyenhagen2014, 869–70)—to be blocked, or, “delayed for the foreseeable future” (Adorno Reference Adorno2001, 15–16), Adorno used “psychosociological writings and radio addresses” (Parkinson Reference Parkinson2014, 44) to stage “a form of public pedagogy with the aim of promoting conscious and social change in the individual”—that is, on the subjective level (48). Reiterating his new categorical imperative from Negative dialectics—the demand that people “arrange their thinking and conduct, so that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen again” (Adorno Reference Adorno2001, 358–61)—Adorno calls upon his audience to confront their coldness. If coldness makes people complicit with genocide, they must confront it; however, assuming that they have all internally reproduced coldness within themselves, they are simply not capable of suddenly adopting a warm and loving stance toward one another. “To preach love already presupposes in those to whom one appeals a character structure different from the one that needs to be changed,” Adorno avers (Adorno Reference Adorno, Henry and Tiedemann2003, 30). So, “[t]he first thing,” instead, is “to bring coldness to the consciousness of itself” (31). Because “[f]or Adorno,” Mussell explains, “there is no way around coldness; the only way is to go through it” (Mussell Reference Mussell2013, 55).

Adorno’s descriptive claim about coldness being fundamental to contemporary subjectivity thus has important normative implications. Since coldness implicates people in evil, rearranging their thinking and conduct to avert further disaster does mean trying to start to develop identification-based solidarity: receptivity to others’ embodied suffering that enables identification with them and the development of ties of solidarity. And this does sound quite close to Tessman’s “sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering.” However, it is precisely because Adorno believes coldness to be an inescapable feature of modern subjectivity that the project of developing sensitivity to others cannot assume moral agents’ capacity to immediately assume this disposition, as doing so would mean being delusional and/or settling for superficiality. Rather, the requisite first step of a character-focused liberatory ethics is a critical confrontation with coldness: a dwelling in coldness, with the aim of cultivating an awareness of it and gaining insights into its genesis. That is, the only way to move beyond coldness is to go through it; coldness cannot be avoided if it is to be overcome. Receptivity to others’ particularity may be the long-term goal, but it is very much an aspiration—as even getting to the place where that ideal trait meaningfully maps onto features of the ways that selves relate to other selves will require a lot of work. This means that critical coldness Footnote ¹⁸ actually has liberatory potential—it has its virtues in a project of personal transformation that aims for greater social and political change.

3. Coldness and trauma: a survivor’s cold streak

Adorno introduces further ethical complexity to his portrayal of coldness through his unsettling remarks on his own coldness in the course of his correspondence with Marcuse in 1969—specifically, in the context of his debate with Marcuse over the proper response to the student movement at the time. There are several points of disagreement in the background of this dispute, among them: Adorno’s belief that praxis was still “blocked,” which Marcuse did not share; Adorno’s conviction that the present situation did not constitute a moment in which theory might be “pushed on further by practice”; and Adorno’s many concerns about the possibilities for wrong praxis in a wrong world, including the risk of leftist movements descending into fascism (Adorno and Marcuse Reference Adorno, Marcuse and Leslie1999, 127). However, what has gone overlooked is the role of Adorno’s testimony to his own coldness in his justification of his praxis-averse position. When Marcuse attests to being moved by a “biological, physiological reaction” to the presently “suffocating and demeaning” political situation, Adorno accuses his “old friend” of being delusional—on account of their supposedly mutual coldness (125). Acknowledging Marcuse’s compelling suggestion that “the situation could be so terrible that one would have to attempt to break out of it, even if one recognizes the objective impossibility,” Adorno insists:

Adorno believes that both he and Marcuse have been made cold by their shared traumatic experience of surviving the Holocaust: specifically, of being forced, by terrible circumstances, to “fai[l] in solidarity” (Bernstein Reference Bernstein2001, 396). In other words, there was nothing that they could have done to prevent the mass murder of their peers. Adorno also implies that, given the presence of such a “cold streak” due to a traumatic past experience, one must be self-reflective about the limitations that this puts on one’s capacity for identification-based solidarity. If Marcuse were sufficiently self-reflective about this, perhaps he would be more honest with himself that it isn’t possible for him to be moved to a reaction to global wars and suffering on the physiological level.

But how did failing in solidarity make them cold? The final section of Negative dialectics, “After Auschwitz,” offers further insights into this survivor’s version of coldness. Adorno writes:

To say that the Auschwitz survivor “ought” to have died along with the millions of their peers who succumbed to “murder … through administration” (354–58) is not to say that those who were murdered deserved it. Rather, it is to say that there was no meaningful difference between the “drowned” and the “saved”—those who perished, and those who did not—on account of which they were divided into these two groups. According to the “logic” of the highly irrational mandate that all Jews should be murdered just because they were Jews, Adorno faced that outcome with just as little likelihood of escaping as any other Jew. This is the sense in which he, too, ought to have been murdered. It is only by chance that he survived when others did not—given that none of his peers deserved to die, either. And this haunts him. Indeed, Adorno suffers from survivor’s guilt: guilt at having survived when so many other Jews did not, and guilt at not having been able to do anything to save the others. The fact that he vividly imagines that his life actually ended in 1944, just like the others, also suggests that he was initially not yet cold like his persecutors; he was still able to identify with his murdered peers, imagining himself into their shoes and sharing their fate. But the guilt that this identification evokes is unbearable. So, ultimately, in order to carry on living at all, he must become cold—he must dis-identify, thereby suffering damage to his capacity for identification-based solidarity. He is forced to adopt the vicious disposition of his persecutors so that he can survive.

Adorno has been criticized for his position on praxis, and not just by his students, who thought that he was a traitor to socialism and to his own radical theoretical work. For Judith Butler, Adorno’s fixation on an “internal check against complicity”—aligning with his deep aversion to joining in—mistakenly “abstracts the moral from the political at the expense of solidarity, producing the very smart and morally pure critic as the model of resistance” (Butler Reference Butler2015, 217).Footnote ¹⁹ To be certain, Adorno ultimately privileges theory over praxis as “the guarantor of freedom in the midst of unfreedom” (Adorno Reference Adorno1998, 263). However, given his remarks about his own coldness, his aversion to praxis admits of another reading: that in speaking of his own cold streak, he is acknowledging his limitations in being moved to action by others’ suffering, because of the way that his capacity for identification-based solidarity has been damaged by trauma. His cold streak, in other words, stands in the way of his ability to feel with others and identify with them. And while self-reflectiveness about this cold streak is crucial to being able to make a decision about whether or not to engage with liberatory projects on the ground, Adorno also implies that the survivor’s version of coldness does not carry with it the same ethical expectation of working through that the more general variety of coldness does. As a survivor of trauma upon whom this self-protective coldness has been forced as a survival mechanism, Adorno apparently feels entitled to reside in his own coldness—as if it is a badge of the horrors he has endured, marking the ethical ambivalences that inevitably characterize wrong life.

To be sure, Adorno’s self-protective coldness may be damaging to him and others in some ways. The need to be vigilant about it suggests that it may not even be possible for him to achieve sufficient clarity about it to guarantee that it won’t affect his judgment on issues like whether to support the student movement; it may cause him to fail in solidarity again rather than moving toward potentially greater receptivity to and identification with others, and joining in resistance efforts with them. Adorno also can’t seem to accept Marcuse’s counter claim that he, personally, was never cold, or no longer is—stubbornly insisting on dwelling in his own coldness in a way that seems to prevent him from honoring his friend’s word, as he strives to find some kind of solidarity in a mutual opting out. But Adorno’s depiction of self-protective coldness also suggests that it has its virtues: it enables him to go on living, in the wake of trauma, as a member of a group that has historically been targeted for annihilation. And it enables him to produce critical theory as his way of ethically responding to a tragically evil world. “[T]here is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it,” he writes, “and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better” (Adorno Reference Adorno and Jephcott2006, 25).

4. Beyond burdened virtues: rethinking indifference as liberatory vice

Tessman and Adorno mutually insist on exposing and sitting with the grim reality of damage to subjectivity wrought by wrong life under oppression, residing, as Mussell writes of Adorno, “in and on the symptom that society would prefer to conceal or explain away as nothing more complex than a subjective pathology” (2013, 61). And both identify indifference, or coldness, as central to dominant contemporary forms of moral damage. Yet, bringing Tessman into dialogue with Adorno has shown that the paradoxes that emerge out of any effort to label particular character traits as virtuous, under oppression, apply to vices, as well—including coldness. Critical coldness has liberatory potential insofar as it is a requisite first step in the process of dialectically moving toward receptivity to others’ embodied suffering, and developing ties of solidarity. And self-protective coldness, when adopted defensively in the wake of trauma, enables survival by allowing survivors to detach from the suffering of others with whom they have failed in solidarity due to their own unchosen impotence. The desire to capture the distinctive ethical complexity of these special varieties of coldness, I argue, merits the introduction of a new class of vices that I shall call liberatory vices. Liberatory vices are dispositions that, while vicious in that they are damaging to human relationality and antithetical to inclusiveness—and, in some cases, inhibiting of participation in collective resistance efforts aimed at building solidarity—nevertheless enable survival of, and (other forms of) resistance to oppression, and violence related to oppression.

In positing the existence of liberatory vices, I am admittedly adhering to a normative distinction between virtues and vices that is only tenuously sustained in a world so rich with ethical ambivalence. Indeed, rather than introducing this new concept, I could have chosen to argue that both critical coldness and self-protective coldness qualify as burdened virtues. Both of these specific varieties of indifference feature a complex conjunction of features that serve the project of surviving and resisting oppression, at the same time as they detract from their bearer’s well-being, and the well-being of others around them—so, they seem to fit Tessman’s definition of burdened virtues. Critical coldness, though a crucial step in the process of working toward identification-based solidarity and receptivity to others’ embodied suffering, would likely continue to harm its bearer until it has been fully sublated; and self-protective coldness would inhibit their participation in political solidarity-building efforts, and potentially estrange them from others, even as it makes survival of trauma possible by sheltering the self from the exquisite pain associated with the devastating destruction of human bonds. It would certainly feel strange to come to the conclusion that these particular kinds of indifference qualify as burdened virtues, given how closely I have attended, here, to the viciousness of indifference, more broadly. But perhaps this would be appropriate; because to give up on a strong dividing line between virtues and vices, and to recognize that “burdened virtues” are really not all that different, definitionally, from “liberatory vices,” would be to simply dwell even longer in the damages of a wrong world than Tessman, for one, dares. And as Tessman herself suggests, it is more important to be realistic about the extent of moral damage so as to be effectively equipped for survival and resistance than it is to protect ourselves, as liberatory theorists, from the unsettling results of our own investigations into the distortions of subjectivity under oppression.

But I think that it is important to honor Adorno and Tessman’s rich, textured testimonies to the historically genocidal results of widespread indifference to others’ extreme suffering, and Adorno’s theorization, in particular, of the many ways that coldness entails destruction of human potentiality and the damaging thingification of idiosyncratic particulars. Thus, I am reluctant to categorize even these special, liberatory forms of coldness as virtues—even burdened virtues—though I am comfortable with declaring them to have their “virtues,” in a thinner sense. Indeed, my definition of liberatory vices is not grounded on a commitment to the view that their bearer is vicious to the core, brutish beyond help; rather, I believe that it is possible for contemporary subjects—even intrinsically cold ones, if I were to agree with Adorno—to behave and even feel in ways that are damaging to human relationality and antithetical to inclusiveness without thereby being morally damaged beyond repair (as on the traditional Aristotelian model).

Furthermore, the creation of new concepts has always been central to liberatory feminist struggle; we need to generate new conceptual tools to capture the complexities of the experience of struggling to survive and thrive under oppression, and to be empowered and motivated to resist ongoing oppression. As Angela Davis argues in “Marcuse’s Legacies,” “[o]ne of the great challenges of any social movement is to develop new vocabularies”—“vocabularies that effect a rupture with” the oppressive language of the status quo (Davis Reference Davis, Abromeit and Mark Cobb2004, 49). If the concept of liberatory vices serves to rupture the oppressive veneer of the known, comfortable, and taken for granted, and to bring about cognitive dissonance with its apparent claiming of an ethics of anti-respectability, perhaps this can invite productive curiosity and consternation about the ethical murkiness with which any liberatory project must grapple in a thoroughly “wrong” world. While the concept of burdened virtues evokes sadness with its acknowledgment of the impossibility of uncomplicated virtue-seeking under oppression, the concept of liberatory vices has the capacity to energize feminists by making us unafraid to confront and claim the distortions to subjectivity with which we have been saddled, and to use them for our own benefit in our struggles for liberation.

To be sure, the value of rethinking indifference as a liberatory vice extends beyond the contexts immediately suggested by the encounter I have staged between Tessman and Adorno, and into longstanding considerations in feminist movement about the productive coldness that survival requires. In the context of feminist solidarity groups, for example, indifference has historically served as a liberatory vice for Black feminists intent upon decentering the suffering of white middle-class feminists for the good of a truly intersectional movement. This position is perhaps most poignantly expressed in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s famous speech on coalition politics at the 1981 West Coast Women’s Music Festival, in which she distinguishes coalitional spaces from home spaces that are nurturing and safe; for Reagon, coalition is dangerous and threatening, but necessary for survival. “The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you,” Reagon declares, “is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive” (Reagon Reference Reagon and Smith1983, 356–57). Reagon caps off her discussion of coalition by bluntly telling her mostly white audience, “I don’t care what you went through or what somebody did to you”; she still expects them to embrace the rich, crisis-ridden space of coalition work (368). Rebecca Wanzo reads Reagon as giving voice to a radical “ethics of uncare” informed by the long history of marginalization of Black women in feminist coalition spaces. This ethics of uncare entails “not expecting care or recognition from people who may not ever understand us,” and not offering care in return (Wanzo Reference Wanzo, Jennifer and Pinto2023, 21). It means correcting for the tendency of white feminists to prioritize their own wounds, in one way or another, at the expense of Black women’s contributions to collective political work—leaving Black women “trying to do the work of therapy instead of other work that needs to be done” (20). An ethics of uncare grounded in the liberatory vice of coldness, then, can effectively empower Black feminists to prioritize shared political goals when approaching feminist coalitional spaces.Footnote ²⁰

In interpersonal settings, such as in the context of romantic relationships, friendships, and even familial relationships, the capacity to be indifferent toward and potentially detach from those who behave in a damaging and/or abusive fashion can also be a self-protective mechanism that enables survival and preserves the harmed person’s dignity. Lacanian critical theorist Mari Ruti writes, for example, that her “psychic survival has always been predicated on [her] ability to walk away from what is debilitatingly painful” (Ruti Reference Ruti2017, 95), arguing against theorists like Butler who believe that people so greatly value recognition that they “would rather sustain wounded psychic attachments than risk losing [their] relational bonds” (82). Ruti insists that there are circumstances in which people are “capable of cutting [their] connection to those who injure [them],” and that “severing debilitating relational bonds is one way … [to] ‘choose’ … autonomy over the suffocating entanglements of traumatizing relationality” (82). Indifference, then, while representing an anti-relational stance, also serves as the affective ground of possibility for the rejection of “bad relationality” in favor of being able to breathe more easily and experience less pain. This is a case in which indifference serves the project of survival by empowering a person suffering from a wounded attachment to choose a more optimistic, self-sustaining vision of relationality—even if this means needing to coldly end friendships or romantic partnerships, or becoming estranged from abusive family members. Ruti clarifies that she does not “reject relationality as such” (2017, 82); her autobiographical account of the traumas of her upbringingFootnote ²¹ reveals this to be a hard-won accomplishment.

Rethinking indifference as a liberatory vice thus opens pathways to uncovering underexplored connections between personal and political moments in which feminists adopt an anti-relational stance as part of our empowerment and pursuit of a better life, even if we may just come off to others as plain cold. And while it may seem like a concession to categorize the liberatory varieties of indifference as vices, with the additional worry that casting the most marginalized subjects—the racialized, the traumatized, the violated, and the under-attended to—as “damaged” in this way might inhibit the effort to equip them with tools of resistance by providing more fodder for victim blamers, I believe that it will be beneficial, if not also cathartic, for the oppressed to mine the liberatory potential of certain forms of “viciousness”—just as it is clarifying to recognize the burdened status of “virtuousness,” under the brunt of oppression.