Privileged Irresponsibility

Abstract

This chapter takes on Joan Tronto’s idea of privileged irresponsibility, which emanates from her work on caring responsibilities, and asks how it may be extended into other concerns such as coloniality and responsibility for the damaged planet. In particular, we examine Tronto’s understanding of how privileged irresponsibility allows privileged groups to excuse themselves from responsibility and Val Plumwood’s mechanisms of dualism which make it possible to maintain privileged irresponsibility. We then discuss how the notion of wilful ignorance plays a significant role in maintaining privileged irresponsibility. Understanding responsibility as relational and political, and hence privileged irresponsibility as also social and political, turns our attention to re-evaluating the ways we understand caring responsibilities for marginalised and disempowered groups of the society. Such a framework makes visible the way in which caring responsibilities—for humans and non-humans alike—are bound up with gender, race, class, ability, human-centredness and other forms of inequality and serve to reproduce privileged irresponsibility.