Sukaina Hirji is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences.

Moral philosophers tend to distinguish the question of whether an agent did the right thing from the question of whether an agent deserves praise or credit for doing the right thing. It is typically thought that in order for an agent to be creditworthy for doing the right thing—in order for their action to have “moral worth”—the agent must have performed the action non-accidentally for the right reasons. Professor Hirji is interested in the moral worth of actions under oppression. She argues that, for members of oppressed groups, doing the right thing for the right reasons is very often not sufficient for their actions to have full moral worth. And, she argues, this has consequences for the moral worth of the actions of the non-oppressed as well. The broader question is how oppressive conditions constrain moral agency and how that, in turn, should change the ways we think about praise and blame.

A Philosopher’s Holiday Lecture sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Faculty.