Hybrid | On Dominated Dominators

Please note that the time allocated for this colloquia will be devoted to discussion of the paper.

Speaker: Prof. Lea Ypi (LSE)

About the Paper

This paper explores the case of dominated dominators as a way of understanding structural domination. I suggest that structural domination, the domination from which dominators suffer (over and above the dominated) is a particularly pernicious form of interference, which ought to worry us more than the agential and intersubjective forms of domination that we have been so far mostly concerned with. I argue that structural domination generates alienation (of both dominators and dominated) and show how alienation is a moral wrong of a distinctive kind which vindicates the distinctive wrong of structural domination. I then discuss some objections and conclude that if the most hideous instances of agential domination are in fact secondary wrongs, wrongs that inherit their wrongness from the primary wrong of domination by structures, this has important implications for resistance to injustice.

About the Speaker

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, all published by Oxford University Press. Her latest book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History published by Penguin Press was a Sunday Times memoir of the year and is being translated in twenty languages.

About the Institute

The Institute brings together political and legal theorists from Law, Political Science and Philosophy and organises regular colloquia in terms 2 and 3. If you would like to be added to the ILPP mailing list please contact us at laws-events@ucl.ac.uk

Book your place

This seminar will be held as hybrid event and will allow a small in-person (at UCL Laws, Bentham House) audience as well as a online audience. If you secure a place in-person but fall sick or are no longer able to attend do contact us at laws-event@ucl.ac.uk and we can transfer your ticket to an online one. 

Book an In-Person Ticket

For our online audience this seminar will be delivered via Zoom Meeting. Attendee cameras can be turned on however microphones will need to be turned off unless when contributing to discussions or putting forward a question for our guest speaker. You will receive your zoom joining link on registration, as well as a link to the paper. Contact the Laws Events team (laws-events@ucl.ac.uk) if you have not received the link.

Book an Online Ticket