Jara-Ettinger and Dunham claim that “[t]he institutional stance gives us the tools to analyze rather than blindly accept institutional structures, to recognize unjust and exploitative systems, and to imagine possibilities for positive change.” But is the institutional stance itself cut out to provide these tools, or is it rather more likely to perpetuate existing injustices?

Of course, a first step to criticizing social roles and their associated institutes and systems is to recognize the pervasive role they play in our lives, in the sense that we often use a person’s social role to understand and predict their behavior, and base our expectations on it. Critically reflecting on this, however, involves going beyond the institutional stance. For one thing, it involves recognizing how people end up in, for example, dominant or subordinate social roles, and considering the extent to which this is often outside of the person’s control. Furthermore, it requires us to recognize how certain expectations that come with social roles are unfair or have unfair consequences. Social change, then, will not come from the institutional stance itself, but from reflecting on social roles and expectations from historical, contextual, and moral perspectives. And importantly, we do not often seem to take up this kind of critical reflection. In this commentary, I will address three reasons for why the institutional stance may prevent us from doing so. Together, these reasons show how the institutional stance in fact explains why social change is hard and injustices tend to persist.

First of all, we can take a variety of stances to understand human behavior and, as Jara-Ettinger and Dunham address as well, this is not neutral: stances lead to looping effects, and they affect social behavior. This is especially clear in case of social roles, since they are strongly tied to the expectations we have of other persons. We do not just predict or try to understand, we judge and criticize when persons do not meet these expectations. But if that is true, there is not such a clear distinction between the stance and reality, not (just) because the institutional stance provides us with such a good picture of reality, but because the institutional stance makes its own expectations true: it is self-fulfilling (see, e.g., Peters, Reference Peters2022). Expecting women to take care of family members in need, for example, may make it so that women in fact do often take care of others. As a result, adopting the institutional stance tends to prevent social change, because it tends to keep persons in the positions they are expected to be in.

This brings me to my second and related point: Jara-Ettinger and Dunham make a rather sharp distinction between behavior that is “constrained” by social roles and “unconstrained” behavior that is the result of personal desires. But things are not as simple as that. We are born into an existing world with established social roles as a woman or minority, for example, and these social roles and expectations affect who we are and how we perceive ourselves. Our desires have been shaped by how others perceive and treat us, and it may take time and effort to come to recognize our so-called adaptive preferences, that in fact perpetuate our own oppression (e.g., Khader, Reference Khader2012). Understanding persons from the institutional stance, then, may make it more likely that they adapt their preferences to what is expected of them in virtue of their social role. Even if their behavior may seem unconstrained and a matter of personal desire, social roles may still unintentionally and unconsciously play a role in what persons want and decide. This, in turn, may suggest that there is no problem that requires addressing; persons just do what they want or end up in a social role that suits them.

Third and finally, at some points, Jara-Ettinger and Dunham talk about hidden institutional structures and role-based systems, but it remains unclear what they exactly mean by this. That is, they do not elaborate on the sense in which these systems and structures are hidden, especially given the fact that the institutional stance at the same time is taken to be quite pervasive. My proposal is that we may be using social roles to understand and expect certain behavior, but we do not always recognize that this is influenced by a social role or by this social role. For example, it may turn out that we expect of mothers to drop everything to pick up their sick child, think we expect this of all parents, but in reality we do not have the same expectations of fathers. An explanation for this might be misattribution: we think that it is the person’s parenthood because of which we have this expectation of them, but in reality, it is their motherhood (see Asma, Reference Asma2025 for further analysis). In that sense, the institutional stance can be pervasive and hidden at the same time, because we fail to realize where our expectations exactly come from and what they imply. As such, again, we may fail to recognize that our expectations are unfair and do not see any reason to critically reflect.

To conclude, if Jara-Ettinger and Dunham are right about the pervasive role the institutional stance plays, and I think they are, we have to seriously consider that this stance may perpetuate injustice because it tends to reinforce, normalize, and hide problematic structures. To address the problems that come with this stance, the fact that, but also why certain persons end up in social positions that are subordinate and out of line with their well-being, we should take into account history and context, and ask ourselves what is morally right. A better picture thus is: the institutional stance exists and plays a pervasive role in how we perceive and understand others, but it tends to keep social structures in place and explains why unfair systems are hiding in plain sight.